BS 1415 
.C7 



THE 



BOOK OF JOB 



BY THE LATE 

REV. GEOEGE CEOLY, LL.D. 

RECTOR OF THE UNITED PARISHES OF ST STEPHEN'S, WALBROOK, 
AND ST BENET'S 



WITH A 

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR BY HIS SON 



WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
MDCCCLXIII 



Deinard-Schiif 



TO 



SIR GEOEGE SINCLAIR, BART. 



Dear Sir George Sinclair, 

to you, who so thoroughly appreciated my 
father's genius, i dedicate this volume — in memory 
of the long, warm, and unwavering friendship, and 
no less warm political sympathy, which subsisted 
between you and its author — in grateful acknow- 
ledgment of your unvarying kindness to myself — 
and also as an expression of sincere respect and 
admiration for your talents, character, and high 
and varied attainments. 

*i have the honour to be, 
Dear Sir George, 
' Your obliged and faithful servant, 

FREDERICK W. CROLY. 

9 Queen Square, London, 
April 1863. 



C ONTENTS. 



CHAP. 




PAGE 


I. 


INTRODUCTORY, . 




1 
1 


II. 






16 


III. 


THE COUNTRY, ORIGIN, AND TIME OF 


JOB. 


23 


IV. 


THE AUTHORSHIP, 




26 


V. 


THE REALITY OF JOB'S HISTORY, 




34 


VI. 


THE TRIAL OF JOB, 




43 


VII. 


WHY WAS THE HISTORY WRITTEN ? 




48 


VIII. 


THE DIALOGUE, . 




65 


IX. 


THE RESURRECTION, 




79 


X. 


THE JEWS, 




91 


XI. 


TYPE AND ANTITYPE, . 




118 


XII. 


APPLICATION OF TYPE AND ANTITYPE 
HISTORY OF JOB AND OF THE JEWS 


TO THE 

• 


122 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



In offering to the public a posthumous work, a 
brief biographical sketch of its author may not be 
unacceptable. 

Descended from a family long settled in the north 
of Ireland, George Croly was born at Dublin on the 
17th August 1780, and received the greater part of 
his education at Trinity College, which he entered 
at the age of fifteen. There he was distinguished 
for proficiency in classical attainments, obtaining, 
among other honours, the Berkeley gold medal for 
Greek. For mathematics he never at any period of 
his life displayed any aptitude. He excelled also 
in poetical and prose composition, the vigour and 
elegance of which procured him on several occasions 
the medal of the Historical Society of the College. 
He also gave evidence of possessing those powers as 
a speaker which were so conspicuous in later life. 
On one occasion, when filling the chair of a com- 
mittee of the Society, he delivered a speech, which 



vi 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



was so distinguished as to entitle him to the "marked 
thanks" of that body — I believe, an unusual honour. 
Among his companions the warmth and kindness of 
his disposition, the vivacity of his temperament, and 
the spirit and intelligence of his conversation, could 
not fail to render him popular. Many of the friend- 
ships formed in college were only dissolved by death. 
One of these companions,* himself a distinguished 
scholar, has informed me that on every occasion of 
their meeting he was " struck by the justness of his 
observations, as well as amused by the sprightliness 
of his wit and the readiness of his repartees and 
that the impression left by his " uncommon agree- 
ability and talents" remained undiminished after 
the lapse of more than half a century. 

Leaving college in 1804 with the degree of M.A., 
it became necessary to decide on a profession. It 
was the wish of his family that he should go to the 
Irish bar, then the most direct avenue to intellectual 
distinction, and made illustrious by the names of 
Curran, Plunket, Flood, and a host of lesser lumin- 
aries. Among this shining circle his talents seemed 
well adapted to secure him a conspicuous place ; but 
he could never overcome his natural distaste to the 
legal profession, and was allowed to follow the bent 
of his own inclination and take holy orders. 

He was ordained by O'Byrne, Bishop of Meath, 
in 1 804, and soon after appointed to a curacy in the 
north of Ireland. Here he remained for several 
* The late learned Dr Wall, Vice-Provost of Trinity College. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. vii 

years ; but this retired and obscure existence was 
unsuited to his active mind. He relinquished his 
curacy, and finally quitted Ireland about the year 
1810. Settling in London, he devoted himself to 
literary pursuits, publishing at brief intervals the fine 
poem 'Paris in 1 815/ the dramatic poem ' Cat aline/ 
the brilliant romance of ' Salathiel,' and numerous 
other works both in prose and poetry. He also con- 
tributed largely to the periodical literature of the da}', 
and became acquainted with most of the literary and 
popular celebrities of that vivid and stirring time. 

He married in 1819 a young lady of great 
personal attractions, with whom his acquaintance 
commenced in rather a romantic manner — having 
procured an introduction to her in consequence of 
being struck with the talent displayed in some verses 
written by her at the age of seventeen, and inserted 
anonymously in the 'Literary Gazette.' 

His ability was now generally acknowledged ; but 
though he acquired reputation, friends, and a dis- 
tinguished position in general society, he obtained 
no advancement in his profession, and at the age of 
fifty was still without preferment. 

In 1832 he took charge of the parish of Eomford, 
in Essex, during three years, in the absence of the 
vicar on account of ill health. In the previous 
year the honorary degree of LL.D. had been con- 
ferred upon him by the University of Dublin, a 
compliment which he highly appreciated. 

The only preferment he ever obtained came from 



viii 



BIOGEAPHICAL SKETCH. 



non-ecclesiastical hands, and was due to the kind- 
ness of one of that political party whose principles 
he so vigorously and consistently opposed through- 
out the whole of his career. Lord Brougham, during 
his tenure of the Great Seal, nominated him to the 
living of Bondleigh, in Devonshire. On visiting 
the place, its repulsive and desolate aspect, situated 
on the edge of Dartmoor, induced him to decline 
accepting it. Lord Brougham promised a more 
eligible benefice, but before a suitable living was at 
his disposal the Ministry suddenly quitted office, 
and with them apparently departed all hope of pre- 
ferment. Lord Lyndhurst, however, who succeeded 
Lord Brougham on the Woolsack, on becoming ac- 
quainted with his predecessor's intention, generously 
carried it into effect, and presented him, in the year 
1835, to the living of St Stephen's, "Walbrook, 
which he held until his death. 

This parish being very small, and most of the 
parishioners non-resident, the new rector could still 
devote a large portion of his time to general litera- 
ture. A still greater advantage of his new position 
was, that it afforded an opportunity of exercising in 
a metropolitan church those remarkable powers as 
a preacher, which had been comparatively thrown 
away upon a rural congregation. The church of St 
Stephen's, previously almost deserted, soon became 
filled, under the influence of this powerful attrac- 
tion, with a large and attentive congregation, most 
of whom came from a considerable distance. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



ix 



In the pulpit my father was pre-eminent. Edu- 
cated in the school of Grattan and Curran, he was no 
unworthy follower of those illustrious men, whose 
efforts had often excited his youthful admiration, and 
whose style he naturally adopted with such modifica- 
tions as suited the severer dignity of the pulpit. This 
similarity of style arose less, however, from the effect 
of study and imitation, than from identity of taste 
and temperament. In some respects, nature had 
been more kind to him than even to those great 
masters of oratory \ Curran s aspect was mean, and 
Grattan had to contend with a voice naturally shrill 
and unpleasing, and a manner extravagant and 
almost grotesque. To my father she had given 
every personal qualification for a great preacher ; a 
commanding presence, a voice of remarkable power, 
flexibility, and sweetness, combined with a natural 
grace of action, which, though entirely unstudied, 
was always suitable and impressive. His mental 
endowments were worthy of these external advan- 
tages. His thoughts were always original, often 
sublime. The fertility and rapidity of his ideas 
were only equalled by his command of language. 
His memory was powerful, and his imagination 
rich, vivid, and picturesque. To these natural gifts 
was added a minute acquaintance with the Scrip- 
tures, and the knowledge of nearly all that ancient 
or modern learning could supply towards their 
illustration or elucidation. Finally, he possessed in 
perfection those crowning merits of a preacher, with- 



X BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



out which, all others fail to excite interest or chain at- 
tention — an animation of manner, an impressiveness 
of delivery, and an earnestness of appeal which can 
alone be imparted by personal piety and unaffected 
sincerity. Mo commonplace allusions, no colloquial 
phraseology, detracted from the dignity of his style. 
His language was lofty as the thought which it em- 
bodied, but never became grandiloquent or pedantic. 
Preaching extempore, often without the assistance of 
notes, he felt each word he uttered. His flow of ideas 
was too copious to allow him to fall into the common 
error of many extempore preachers, who substitute 
sound for sense — who lose themselves in involved 
sentences, and weary their hearers with endless repe- 
titions. His few published sermons, almost always 
written after they were delivered, give an inadequate 
idea of the preachers powers. They are in general 
too condensed; they contain the argument, but 
often want the amplitude and beauty of the illus- 
tration with which he adorned and enforced it from 
the pulpit. 

With regard to the matter of his discourses, it 
may be said of them generally, that they were 
directed rather to the elucidation of the difficulties 
of Scripture and the vindication of its authority, 
than to the general enforcement of moral duties as 
to which every man's conscience is his best monitor. 
He preferred to instil truth and to combat error ; 
he thought it wiser to instruct than to denounce \ 
he laboured to convince rather than to terrify ; be- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



XI 



lieving that the superstructure of a virtuous life 
could only "be effectually reared when its foundations 
had been laid, not on the sands of ephemeral feeling 
or passing terror, hut on the rock of that hrm and 
living faith which can alone stand unshaken when 
assailed by the winds and waves of earthly cares and 
temptations. But his was no cold logic, which often 
repels more than it persuades. It is the happy 
peculiarity of Irish eloquence, that it appeals equally 
to the head and heart ; that imagination enriches 
without detracting from its strength ; that it is or- 
namented without being encumbered \ that the solid 
shaft of argument is winged with the rich plumage 
of that fine sensibility which belongs to the national 
genius, and which must give it entrance wherever 
there is intellect to understand or a heart to feel. 
My father shared this fortunate combination. It is 
alike difficult to convey an idea of the power of his 
reasoning, and of the variety and beauty of the 
images which crowded upon his imagination, and 
were flung with splendid prodigality from his 
lips. Still less can I do justice to the vigour and 
effect with which he delivered those fine bursts of 
eloquence which must have touched the coldest 
heart. Sometimes excited by the grandeur of his 
subject — perhaps one of those vivid anticipations 
of the glory and happiness of the future world 
in which he loved to indulge — he was alto- 
gether carried away by his feelings. His eye 
flashed, his voice trembled, his form appeared ac- 



xii 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



tually to dilate under the influence of his own burn- 
ing thoughts. 

If this language appear overcharged, it is used in 
no spirit of exaggeration. I can only give my own 
impressions, others must judge of their correctness. 
I am no longer " under the wand of the enchanter," 
hut I still feel the influence of the spell. Those 
solemn tones and those stately sentences yet haunt 
my memory, and will subsist, as cherished though 
mournful recollections, until my last hour. 

A charge that has been made against my father's 
preaching I must briefly notice : he has been fre- 
quently called a political preacher. No accusation 
could be more unfounded. He did, no doubt, on 
the occurrence of some great public event, often 
make it the subject of a discourse. This habit was 
well known and much appreciated, the church at 
such times being always more than usually thronged. 
But these occasions were necessarily at distant inter- 
vals, and he constantly alluded to the topic of the 
day in the most general terms. It was used as an 
illustration of the course of Providence, or applied as 
a, great moral lesson, without the slightest allusion 
to political parties, persons, or opinions. ~No man 
had a higher sense of what was due to the pulpit. 
His sermons, though necessarily sometimes doctrinal, 
were rarely controversial, and always practical. 

The life of a London clergyman presents in 
general few incidents, and that of the rector of St 
Stephen's proved no exception. For many years, 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



xiii 



though, always actively employed, he led a compara- 
tively private life ; at times brought more promi- 
nently before the world by the publication of some 
new work • still oftener by his appearance on the 
platform of some great public meeting when the 
Church required a defender, or those Protestant and 
Conservative principles, which have made England 
what she is, an advocate. On these occasions he 
spoke with vigour and effect, respecting little and 
consulting less the opinions and wishes of timid and 
worldly ecclesiastics and time-serving politicians ; 
fearlessly braving the hostility he provoked, and 
utterly disregarding all private considerations when 
they stood in the way of what he considered his 
duty to religion, to his country, and to mankind. 

So far as his worldly prospects were concerned, 
the result was what might have been expected. The 
English Church offers little encouragement to talent, 
and still less to independence of character. The 
clergyman who ventures "to speak boldly as he 
ought to speak," interposes an impassable gulf be- 
tween himself and the prizes of his profession. But 
besides " the bold uncompromising mind" which dis- 
inclined him to pass through life with a gag upon 
his lips, my father had to contend against an obstacle 
which experience has shown to be almost insur- 
mountable in the English Church. As Grattan said 
of Kirwan, the curse of Swift was upon him — " he 
was an Irishman and a man of genius." 

In the year 1845 the domestic current of a career 



XIV 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



which, though not prosperous, had hitherto escaped 
roost of the severer misfortunes of life, was disturbed 
by an event which cast a heavy shadow over the 
remainder of his days. His eldest son George, a 
youth of remarkable promise, possessed of almost 
every quality of head or heart which could excite 
admiration or inspire affection, was suddenly taken 
from him. As a lieutenant in the 26th Bengal 
Xative Infantry he had served with credit in the 
second Cabul campaign, at almost every engage- 
ment of which he was present. Generally admired 
and beloved, a distingirished career seemed opening 
before him ; but Providence willed otherwise. Brave, 
handsome, amiable, and accomplished, he fell glori- 
ously, at the age of twenty-three, in the desperate 
and doubtful battle of Ferozeshah, struck by a shell 
while gallantly storming the intrenched camp of the 
Sikhs. From this blow, his father, who almost idol- 
ised him, did not recover for many years. For a time 
he was completely overwhelmed, and his health suf- 
fered so severely that even his life appeared in danger. 
Gradually health and spirits returned, but to the 
last hour of his life the slightest allusion to his loss 
so painfully affected him that the subject was 
always scrupulously avoided. 

In the year 1847 he accepted the appointment of 
afternoon preacher at the Foundling Hospital ; but, 
having heard that some of the governors of that 
institution had thought fit to remark upon his ser- 
mons as "too abstruse," and naturally resenting 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



XV 



such empty criticism, lie instantly resigned the office. 
He had held it but three months. 

The year 1851 was another year of affliction : at 
its commencement died his loving and beloved wife, 
after a companionship of thirty years. Her death 
was followed in a few months by that of his daughter, 
a promising and intelligent child, aged nine years. 
Again his health gave way so as to oblige him for 
some months to resign all clerical duty. From 
this bereavement he also recovered, and the re- 
mainder of his days were passed peacefully and 
happily, undisturbed by any severe bodily or mental 
affliction. 

In many respects this period was the most in- 
teresting, possibly even the happiest, of his life. 
Though now past the allotted threescore years and 
ten, time had dealt kindly with him. Age had 
softened, though by no means subdued, the natural 
fire of his character. His intellect, retaining to the 
last all the vigour of his prime, was enriched by the 
study and reflection of many years. His heart, 
which long contact with a world to which he owed 
little might well have hardened, retained all its 
warmth and more than feminine tenderness \ his 
spirit, the freshness and almost even the simplicity 
of infancy. Still preserving his interest in public 
affairs, he had survived the dreams of ambition. His 
entire nature seemed to become more spiritual; and, 
in the affection of all around, the duties of his pro- 
fession, the retirement of his study, and the testi- 



Xvi BIOGEAPHICAL SKETCH. 

niony of his conscience, he enjoyed, I believe, as 
much quiet happiness as falls to the lot of most 
in this feverish and anxious world. 

He was still the most delightful of companions. 
His sense of humour was as keen, his spirits as 
high, the turns of his fancy as quick and ingenious, 
his wit as vivid as it had ever been. His memory 
seemed to retain with surprising freshness almost all 
that he had ever heard or read. His love of a lively 
anecdote was only equalled by his happy art of 
telling it, and his original observations were always 
striking and interesting. He was equally ready to 
discuss the gravest or the most amusing topic. The 
dignity of his character and the force of his mind 
lent weight to all his opinions, while the playfulness 
and vivacity of his manner invested his most trifling 
jeu d? esprit with an irresistible charm. He never 
lost either his fondness or capacity for society, and 
was everywhere a welcome guest. His powers of 
conversation were of a high order, abounding in 
anecdote, of which his stores seemed inexhaustible, 
enlivened by brilliant and incessant sallies of wit 
and humour, and sustained with unflagging spirit. 
He would keep a whole table amused and interested 
an entire evening. Many who listened admiringly 
to his light badinage and smart repartee scarcely 
gave him credit for possessing a serious side to his 
character; yet all who knew him intimately will 
readily acknowledge, that his conversation in his 
graver moods was even more fascinating than in his 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xvii 

festive moments. Often, and with increasing fre- 
quency as he advanced in years, when among a few 
familiar friends, still more frequently in the privacy 
of his own family, he would speak of those subjects 
which have the deepest interest for us all, in a strain 
of solemnity and sublimity, yet of unaffected sin- 
cerity and simplicity, which rivalled, if it did not 
surpass, even that of his eloquent public discourses. 
Of death and all that follows it he spoke with the 
awe that is natural and suitable, but with the pious 
resignation and calm confidence which belong to 
the Christian. A life of the purest morality and a 
faith of the deepest sincerity had deprived death 
of all its terrors, but those which are inseparable 
from our nature. Without the slightest symptom of 
declining mental vigour, and little of bodily decay, 
he enjoyed life to the last, thankful for the present, 
hopeful for the future. 

In this happy frame of mind, the summons, though 
it came with awful suddenness, could not find him 
unprepared. In a letter written in 1854 to a near 
and dear relative, he thus expresses himself on the 
subject of death : — " A clergyman, whose duty it is 
to remind others of their end, cannot have the sub- 
ject of his own departure long absent from his 
thoughts. Were the choice permitted me, I should 
prefer a period of gradual decay to a sudden sum- 
mons (adding the remarkable words strongly under- 
lined) ; but I make no request — God's will be done." 
Subsequently I have heard him express a wish that 
b 



Xviii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



lie might fall asleep in his arm-chair, and wake in 
another world. He always professed great dread of 
a long and painful illness. This was spared him. 

" His frame was firm, his powers were bright, 
Though now his eightieth year was nigh ; 

Then with no fiery throbbing pain, 
No cold gradations of decay. 

Death broke at once the vital chain, 
And freed his soul the nearest way." 

On the morning of the 24th November 1860, I 
left him in the enjoyment of his usual excellent 
health and spirits. In the afternoon, while walking 
in Holborn, unfortunately alone, he staggered, feD, 
and instantly expired. Death was caused by disease 
of the heart, of which there had been no previous 
indications beyond occasional pains in the chest, 
which were attributed to other causes. By special 
permission of the Home Secretary, he was interred 
within his own church of St Stephens, which was 
filled to overflowing on the occasion by the sorrowing 
members of his congregation and numerous private 
friends, a considerable number of the city clergy at- 
tending in their robes as a mark of respect. 

A series of memorial windows have since been 
plaeed in the church by public subscription. A 
marble bust, formerly presented to him as a testi- 
monial, and bequeathed by him to the parish, has also 
been erected as his monument : nor has anything 
been wanting, either on the part of parishioners or 
friends, that could do honour to the memory of one 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



xix 



who alike excited admiration by the brilliancy of his 
talents, respect even from his political opponents by 
his consistency, fearlessness, and honesty, and con- 
ciliated the affection of all who came into personal 
contact with him by the charm of his manners, the 
interest of his conversation, and the goodness of his 
heart. 

In this sketch I am not conscious of exagger- 
ation, or of having fairly laid myself open to the 
charge of extravagant eulogy; but should the tone of 
these remarks be thought too panegyrical, my apology 
must be found in the strong feelings of natural affec- 
tion, heightened by the admiration inevitably attend- 
ant upon daily association with a being so singularly 
gifted, whose qualities of the heart were not inferior 
to those of the head, and my close relationship to 
whom has been alike the pride and happiness of my 
life. His were 

1 ' The virtues of a temperate prime, 
Blest with an age exempt from scorn or crime— 
An age that melts with imperceived decay, 
And glides in modest innocence away ; 
Whose peaceful day Benevolence endears, 
Whose night congratulating Conscience cheers ; 
The general favourite, as the general friend. 1 ' 



The present work, falling into my hands in a 
scattered state, labours under all the disadvantages 
of posthumous publication, and the consequent 



XX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



want of that careful revision and finish, which its 
author would have bestowed upon it. Yet, though 
it might perhaps have been more elaborated had 
the writer's life been prolonged, it is essentially 
complete. The theory which it embodies had been 
formed for several years. A few verbal inaccuracies 
and obvious omissions I have ventured to correct and 
supply. 

On the subject of my father's theological writings 
in general, I am anxious to say a few words in jus- 
tice to his reputation, both as an author and as a 
clergyman. The present work is the last of a long 
series which have proceeded at intervals from the 
same prolific pen, but which have never excited 
the same attention as those on secular subjects. 
Yet it is on these that he bestowed the greatest 
pains, and by these, both from their more strictly 
professional character, and the infinite importance 
of the subjects on which they treat, that he would 
desire chiefly to be remembered. More versatile 
even than his countryman, Goldsmith, it may be 
said of him with still more propriety, "Tetigit fere 
omne genus scribendi et nihil tetigit quod non 
ornavit." There was scarcely any kind of composi- 
tion, either in prose or poetry, including even tra- 
gedy and comedy, which he did not attempt, and 
with almost equal success. In literature, as in con- 
versation, he wandered "from grave to gay, from 
lively to severe," and was at home in all. Eut his 
favourite theme was theology. Nature had stamped 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



xxi 



liim a divine. She had given him a mind like his 
body, massive, or rather Cyclopean. Xo landscape 
was so grand, no mountain so lofty or nigged, as to 
satisfy his ideas of sublimity. His conception al- 
ways embraced the loftiest range, his imagination 
always grasped the strongest image. To a mind 
thus constituted, the subject which supplies views to 
which all others must necessarily be tame, naturally 
offered supreme attractions. But this natural apti- 
tude might have remained undeveloped, had not 
his professional convictions induced him to give 
superior attention to theology as a study. To 
this task he applied himself gravely and conscien- 
tiously, and as a matter of duty. Having, in the 
first instance, fully satisfied himself that the Bible 
contained the oracles of Divine wisdom, he never 
considered himself at liberty to doubt or deny its 
truths, however mysterious, explain away its miracu- 
lous narratives, or pervert or dilute its doctrines. 
Confining himself to its illustration and explanation, 
he never diverged from its teaching, " neither add- 
ing thereto, or taking therefrom." In all his volu- 
minous writings there cannot be found one sentence 
at variance with the plain meaning of Scripture, or 
with the opinions and doctrines held and taught by 
its most learned, most sincere, and most successful 
interpreter, the Church of England, to which, 
though he owed her no special gratitude (injusta 
noverca). he was deeply attached. Of her it may 
be said that, whatever may be her shortcomings, 



XXII BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



she owes theni to the incapacity, indolence, and 
nepotism of those who too often fill her high posi- 
tions, not to the defect of her principles — that after 
the lapse of three centuries she still retains the 
vigour of her youth, and, equally free from the en- 
cumbrances of superstition, and the follies of fana- 
ticism and sectarianism, still exhibits to the world 
the purest form of Christianity. 

My father's theology was not of that flimsy and 
trilling character which may satisfy professors of 
divinity at our universities, or the chaplains of 
bishops. He looked upon it as a science requir- 
ing, more than all others, severe and diligent study, 
and to it he gave all the powers of a remark- 
ably vigorous understanding, aided by solid and 
varied learning. He brought to it a penetration 
singularly acute ; and, perhaps more important than 
all, that humble and reverential spirit which can 
alone hope for success. Like all his other works, 
but even in a more striking degree, his theological 
writings are marked by extraordinary originality. 
They are no mere repetitions of exploded theories 
and often-refuted arguments ; no mere digests of 
the labours of others, but absolutely and peculiarly 
his own. Probably this originality has in some 
measure prevented their attaining that popularity 
which writers of far inferior powers have obtained 
by artfully adapting their productions to the popu- 
lar taste. To this device my father's lofty spirit 
could never have descended. He could not be un- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



xxiii 



conscious that his writings contained many theories 
which, from their very boldness and novelty, 
were little adapted to meet with general reception, 
and many opinions which ran counter to popular 
prejudice ; but regardless of any object but truth, 
he never suppressed an opinion which he sincerely 
entertained, however unpopular, nor disguised any 
doctrine which he found in Scripture, however un- 
palatable. Looking upon the Scriptures with the 
veneration due to their divine authority, and admit- 
ting that their essential truths were accessible to the 
most unlearned, he conceived that they had not yet 
yielded up all their treasures. I have often heard 
him say that the Bible was a mine of spiritual 
wealth, hitherto but very partially explored ; that 
almost every word was pregnant with meaning, and 
that although familiar with it from his earliest 
years, he never consulted it without acquiring 
additional knowledge, or seeing something in a light 
which had never occurred to him before. His system 
of interpretation was strikingly simple, logical, and 
literal. In opposition to those shallow but dangerous 
writers who would insinuate that even the narrative 
portion of Scripture is in a great degree metaphori-* 
cal and figurative, he maintained that in almost every 
instance the natural was the true meaning. The 
daring speculations, the hazy theories and mystical 
meanings of the German school, now boasting so 
many imitators among ourselves, found no favour 
with him. He ridiculed the ponderous obscurity 



XXIV BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



of their style, and looked with, horror on their 
opinions, which are generally infidel when they are 
not unintelligible. To illustrate the strength of his 
feelings on this subject, I am tempted to quote the 
following fine passage from one of his sermons. 
Though written several years before the publication 
of the startling volumes which have lately created 
so much discussion, it is especially applicable to 
the present time. Its unhesitating vigour and strong 
denunciation stand in striking and noble contrast 
with the mildly- expressed "regret" which, on the 
appearance of ' Essays and Reviews/ satisfied the 
Bishop of London's sense of duty. They are both 
equally characteristic ; of which would St Paul have 
approved 2 

" Infidelity of late has changed its tone ; it is no 
longer contemptuous, insulting, and audacious. It 
now assumes the pretence of reluctant doubt, labori- 
ous learning, and conscientious investigation. The 
bold blasphemer startles us no more ; he wears the 
cloak of the student, and solicits us into temptation. 
Yet more desperate corruptions of the truth of God, 
more profligate attempts to unsettle the soul, or a 
more inveterate passion to throw man into the grasp 
of moral death, were never exhibited in the most 
ostentatious periods of hostility to the GospeL The 
volumes to which I allude are chiefly Continental. 
They have not yet made serious progress in this 
country, bat they are advancing, and wherever they 
shall triumph, the belief in a God, the reliance on an 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XXV 



atonement, and the hope of a glorious immortality, 
will be no more." The italics and capitals are his 
own. 

[Nor did he look with much less disgust on that 
offensive familiarity with sacred names and things 
which is characteristic of another class of religious 
writers, and which so nearly approaches actual pro- 
fanation. His hostility to Popery, and its ally, 
Puseyism, was well known. Protestantism found no 
more zealous and vigorous champion. But he was 
not less opposed to that scarcely less mischievous 
teaching, which dilutes where it does not venture to 
deny many of the most important doctrines of 
Christianity, and which, in an affectation of sim- 
plicity, degrades the dignity and perverts the truth 
of Scripture by attempting to low^er it to the com- 
prehension of the nursery. " Christianity," he said, 
was " a manly religion, addressed to manly under- 
standings, and to be taught in manly language ; " 
and to quote another favourite expression, it was 
"supremely rational/' In this spirit he always 
treated it. It is the characteristic of his religious 
works, as it was also of his pulpit discourses, that 
they are " supremely rational." 

They appeal always to reason, never to mere senti- 
ment. Their logic is often close, but never obscure. 
Their language, though simple and natural, is always 
elevated, and often reaches the highest strain of 
eloquence. Their literary beauties would make them 
remarkable as mere compositions. But they have 



XXvi BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



a higher value. They are not the rhapsodies of a 
showy and artful declairner ; anxious for display, 
but careless of conviction. They contain the gen- 
uine sentiments of a man of talent, learning, and 
piety, who had devoted himself to the considera- 
tion of these subjects with unusual perseverance 
and energy. Their object is the defence of Chris- 
tianity ; and the heartfelt sincerity of the writer, 
and his unshaken faith in the truths which he main- 
tained, were evidenced by the whole tenor of a long 
and active life, spent in the public advocacy and 
private practice of whatever is noble, honourable, 
and good, on which neither the bitterness of poli- 
tical hostility, nor the still deeper animosity of 
religious opposition, has ever been able to cast a 
shadow or affix a stain. 

These studies were the absorbing pursuit of his 
life. Commenced in youth, they were the favour- 
ite occupation of his manhood and the consolation 
of his age. They exercised continually an increasing 
fascination over him, which amounted almost to a 
passion. The thoughts of which his theological 
works are the expression, occupied his mind, though 
by no means to the exclusion, certainly to the 
domination of all others. They may be traced 
strongly in his poetry, and are visible in most of his 
secular writings. Though every allusion to these 
high and sacred subjects was carefully suppressed in 
general society, from a feeling of their unsuitableness 
in a mixed and festive gathering, and also from an 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XXvii 



invincible dislike to even the appearance of ostenta- 
tious piety, they were almost his ordinary topics of 
conversation amongst his intimate friends, and 
especially when alone with his family. How often 
have I listened enchanted as " truths divine came 
mended from his tongue,' ? and as he continued to 
pour out the most sublime thoughts in a strain 
of innate and unconscious eloquence, and in the 
most solemn and touching tones, almost doubted 
which most to admire — the power of the intellect 
which could form such conceptions, or the grandeur 
of the religion which could awaken such hopes. 
Even in this life these useful labours and these high 
contemplations had their reward. They had a per- 
ceptible effect upon his own mind. Always elevated, 
it seemed to become more spiritual and more and 
more weaned from the world as the period of its great 
change approached. To them he owed much of 
that serenity and unruffled cheerfulness, " that peace 
which the world cannot give/'' which more especially 
marked the closing years of a life which had in 
many respects been a disappointed and anxious one. 
They enabled him to endure with resignation the 
heaviest afflictions, and to bear without complaint 
what must have been a severe trial to a naturally 
ambitious and aspiring mind, the professional neglect 
which was the hard reward of honest independence, 
fearlessness in the discharge of duty, of a lofty 
spirit which scorned to flatter or to solicit, and of 
unswerving political consistency. "With all the 



XXviii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

ardour of his youth, my father was still projecting 
several new works — amongst others, one on the Book 
of Daniel, an essay on the Types, and he even spoke 
of a complete commentary on the Bible. These pro- 
jects were, unhappily, never destined to be realised ; 
but it may be permitted us to believe that even at 
this moment his emancipated spirit, rejoicing in the 
consciousness of expanded faculties and larger know- 
ledge, may be pursuing the investigations which de- 
lighted it on earth, and exulting in the disclosure of 
those mysteries which form the most interesting of 
all speculations here, but of which the full solution 
must be reserved to the world beyond the grave. 

F. W. CROLY. 



London, April 1863. 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 



The most important exercise of the mind 
is the study of Scripture ; for on that 
study depends our knowledge, on our 
knowledge our faith, on our faith our sal- 
vation. Christianity is a religion of facts : 
these facts must obviously be known, 
proved, and explained before they can 
impress the conduct of man ; and where 
that study is disregarded, the inevitable 
result is soon visible in the sudden vigour 
of some form of irreligion. What is the 
cause of the increasing spread of infidelity, 
which is as undeniable as it is alarming ? 



xxx author's preface. 



Neglect of the Scriptures. And what is 
the remedy % Their study ; their vigorous, 
learned, and intelligent elucidation ; the 
heartfelt appeal to an authority which, 
though inaccessible to arrogance, world- 
liness, and imposture, has never denied 
its truth to the sincere seeker after its 
wisdom. 

This illustrious task must fall to Eng- 
land. 

On the Continent, theology is hopeless. 
In the lands of Popery it is a corpse ; the 
suppression of the Scriptures has crushed 
out all its vitality, and the attempt to 
revive it would be rebuked by the dungeon. 
Even in the countries of Protestantism 
the Christian ear is constantly pained, and 
the intellect scandalised, by the contemp- 
tuous frivolity and heartless insolence with 
which the learned caste profane the Bible. 
With the majority it is like the corpse of 



author's preface. xxxi 

a malefactor, thrown before them only to 
be dissected. "With even the more re- 
served it is only a curious compilation, 
the work of a long; succession of legendarv 
ages, and bearing marks of the caprices, 
corruptions, and barbarisms of them all; — 
every man (with few exceptions), feeling 
himself, in defiance of the curse, entitled 
to add or diminish according to his plea- 
sure ; to pronounce one fragment a mystery 
and the other a myth ; to qualify the 
truth of one part by the fictions of another ; 
exhibiting the whole as a huge miscellany, 
in which all may select their materials, 
exercise a sceptical ingenuity, and establish 
an ephemeral reputation. How long this 
reign of the scoffer may be permitted, lies 
in a higher arbitration than that of man ; 
but already " they have their reward" — 
fruitless labour, learned fallacy, confusion 
more perplexed, and cavil without end. 



xxxii author's preface. 

The general view of the Book of Job 
taken in this volume is, that it records a 
great providential transaction — establish- 
ing for its own age a moral principle of 
the first necessity, and giving to posterity 
a distinct and memorable type of the 
Jewish nation from the reign of Solomon 
to the end of the world. 

If this volume should fall into the hands 
of a Jew, I desire him to believe that it 
has been written for no purpose of con- 
troversy, that it offers no offence to his 
natural feelings, and that its sole object is 
to elucidate a portion of Scripture which 
has hitherto remained in obscurity. For 
the writer nothing shall be said, but that 
he has approached this task with a due 
sense of its responsibilities, with no pre- 
conceived theory, but with a solemn esti- 
mate of human infirmity in the interpre- 
tation of the " Oracles of God/' 



THE 



BOOK OF JOB. 

* 

CHAPTEE L 

The Book of Job is probably the oldest 
in the world. Unrivalled for strength of 
language, depth of feeling, and originality 
of subject, it has always excited the highest 
interest of the theologian. Eemarkable as 
being the only work of continued argumen- 
tation in Scripture, it is especially directed 
to the proof of a Particular providence, the 
rule by which the providential government 
acts on individual life, and the illustration 

A 



2 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



of those natural prejudices which obscure 
the general action of that government on 
the feelings of man. The personal char- 
acter of Job, his intellectual vigour, the 
daring spirit of his defence, the sternness 
of his fortitude, the humility of his peni- 
tence, the depth of his suffering, and the 
splendour of his reward, complete the 
most colossal monument of sacred anti- 
quity. 

On the revival of learning in Europe 
the Book excited active attention, and was 
investigated with great critical industry ; 
yet nothing could be more palpable than 
the failure of this industry to obtain a 
satisfactory interpretation. The purport 
of the noble narrative was still a mys- 
tery; and except for our natural delight 
in vivid and various eloquence, pictur- 
esque conceptions, and fine touches of the 
human heart — all consecrated by their 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



3 



place in Scripture — it could possess scarce- 
ly more value for us than a column of 
hieroglyphics, or a coffer in an Arabian 
catacomb. 

Still, " all Scripture is by inspiration of 
God/' "We must not surrender to our 
indolence what has been given for our 
instruction. If this striking; document re- 
mains without any explanation satisfactory 
to an unprejudiced inquirer, this perplex- 
ity may largely result from the adoption 
of theories in preference to facts. The 
Baconian method has been too seldom 
adopted in theology. The generality of 
commentators on Job have begun with a 
theory: it has thus been imagined a poem, 
a drama, a history, a Jewish apologue, and 
an Oriental allegory. Its chronology has 
been equally fanciful. It has been thus 
dated before Abraham, and after ; before 
Moses, and after ; before Solomon, and 



4 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



after. Its authorship has been equally the 
creature of imagination ; and one of the 
most solemn, and perhaps the most im- 
portant, portions of Scripture has been 
left by this vagueness of view a problem 
to posterity. 

A few of the leading interpretations 
will show this general confusion. Jerome, 
in his Interpretation, regards the Book 
as typical of Christianity ; Job as the 
type of Christ ; the Land of Uz as the 
Virgin Mary ; the seven sons of Job as 
the seven forms of the Holy Spirit ; the 
three daughters as the Law, the Prophets, 
and the Gospel ; the sheep of Job as the 
Church ; the camels as the Gentiles ; and 
the oxen as the Jews ! 

Pope Gregory the Great (about a.d. 
604), in his Morals of the Booh of Job, 
also regards Job as a type of Christ, but 
apportions the other characters with a 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 5 

different exercise of imagination. His wife 
is the carnality of the world ; his friends 
are the heretics inveighing against our 
Lord under pretence of giving him coun- 
sel ; the name of Job, which he inter- 
prets " Grief/' exhibiting the Passion of 
the Redeemer, or the sufferings of the 
Church ; and the reward and reconcilia- 
tion of Job the general conversion of man- 
kind •! 

Since the Reformation, theology has 
supplied a long list of active interpreters 
in Germany and England ; but as the 
later may be presumed to comprise the 
chief interpretations, the references are 
limited to the past and present centuries. 

The restless authorship and episcopal 
rank of AVarburton give him a certain 
position among the divines of the last 
century ; but he totally wanted the tem- 
perament essential to an interpreter of 



6 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



Scripture. Like the generality of self- 
educated men, Warburton always regards 
himself as infallible, treats an objection as 
an insult, and denounces an opponent as 
an aggressor. In criticism, all his knots 
are Gordian, and he cuts them all. In 
controversy, if he cannot drive the ob- 
stacle before him, he buries it in a heap of 
inapplicable quotations, and hurries on. 
Finding the doctrine of the Resurrection 
in the Book of Job. and conscious that this 
fact overthrew the whole fabric of his 
Divine Legation, he, w T ith a reckless- 
ness almost profane, denied at once its 
object, antiquity, and inspiration. On his 
theory, the w^ork dates only from the age 
of Ezra, and is a drama founded on the 
Babylonian Captivity. Job is the Jewish 
nation ; his wife the marriage of the 
Jew^s with the heathen women ; and his 
three friends, the three opponents of the 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



7 



rebuilding of the Temple, Sanballat, 
Tobiah, and Geshem. 

His contempt for his fellow-labourers is 
extreme. u Job," he says, " has always 
suffered from his friends. He was first 
bound to the stake by a long catena of 
Greek fathers, then tortured by Pineda, 
then strangled by Caryl, afterwards cut 
up by "Wesley, and anatomised by Gar- 
net. I only acted the tender part of his 
wife, and was for making short work of 
him." 

But men of higher intellectual quality 
were not more fortunate. Magee *a vigor- 
ous and acute theologian, conceives the 
general purport of the "Poem" (!) to be, 
" the great duty of submission to the 
divine will, and the proof that every man, 
suffering patiently, will finally be re- 

* Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and afterwards Arch- 
bishop of Dublin. 



8 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



warded." And to this conclusion the 
writer comes in the face of Job's constant 
declamation against the divine justice ! 

Hales,* in his learned Chronology, con- 
ceives the purport of the Book to be three- 
fold : to prove the faith of good men 
under the afflictions of Satan ; to show 
that this world is not a perfect state of 
retribution ; and, lastly, that the apparent 
irregularities of divine justice here will 
be redressed in the future state. 

The misconceptions of this view are 
obvious : the faith of Job is not in ques- 
tion ; the subject is not divine retribu- 
tion, but direct justice ; and the reward of 
Job is not referred to a future state. In 
the whole argument there is no attempt 
to reconcile the evils of the present state 
with the anticipation of the future. When 
Job refers to the world beyond the grave, 

* Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



9 



he alludes merely to the vindication of his 
character. 

Gray,- in his Key to the Old Testament, 
without going largely into the subject of 
Job, regards the scope of the Book to be 
"the unfolding" of God's design in human 
affliction, and one of its objects to have 
been the denial of the doctrines of the two 
principles of Good and Evil, which figured 
early in the Oriental theology. 

His conceptions of Job's character are 
less exact ; he speaks of it as not to be 
estimated from the " unguarded expres- 
sions which his sufferings occasionally pro- 
voked/' But it should have been remem- 
bered that only those sufferings produced 
the actual evidence of his character, so long 
disguised from himself. They tested the 
hollo wness of his original submission, and 
the feebleness of his original fortitude ; it 

* Bishop of Bristol. 



10 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



was only by his pangs that lie was taught 
to be conscious of his failings. Trial com- 
pelled the confession, that his early con- 
fidence was presumption, and his early 
knowledge ignorance. 

Peters, a Cornish clergyman, produced 
the most laborious volume in the contro- 
versy — a volume on which subsequent 
authorship has habitually drawn for the 
learning of the question ; but learning 
chiefly expended on the easy task of prov- 
ing the loose logic of AVarburton. 

Lowth, a name still honoured for his 
Lectures on Hebrew Poetry, a work whose 
elegance partially atones for its slightness, 
was forced into the general controversy 
by Warburton : but he added nothing to 
the illustration, and little to the interest, 
of the subject. 

Hengstenberg, professor of theology at 
Berlin, a voluminous commentator, states 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



11 



the purport chiefly to be, that the suffer- 
ings of the good, and the prosperity of 
the bad, are, in the end, equally consis- 
tent with divine justice. * 

Lee, late Hebrew professor at Cam- 
bridge, a writer of extensive knowledge 
in Oriental modes of thought and litera- 
ture, conjectures that the Book has three 
distinct objects : 1st, The proof that there 
is a power in religion enabling man, even- 
tually, to overcome all temptation ; 2d, 
To show the imperfection of human ideas 
regarding the moral government of God ; 
3d, To provide a volume of doctrine ade- 
quate to the necessities of the faithful for 
ever. 

Mason Good, a man of accomplished 
and intelligent zeal in sacred literature, 
and who has given a spirited translation 
of the Book, thus says : " What is the 

* Article on Job in Kitto's Encyclopaedia. 



12 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



ultimate intention of the Book of Job. and 
for what purpose is it introduced into the 
Hebrew and Christian canons ? It will 
appear that it is for the purpose of mak- 
ing those canons complete, by writing as 
full an account as is necessary of the dis- 
pensation of the patriarchs with the two 
dispensations by which it was progres- 
sively succeeded." 

The total diversity of all these interpre- 
tations shows their uselessness. They can- 
not all be true ; none of them are true. 
The Book is open to every reader, and the 
first questions which suggest themselves 
to any rational mind — Why was Job afflict- 
ed ? why was his history written \ and 
why has that history found a place in 
Scripture % — receive scarcely the slightest 
illustration from the whole body of those 
laborious, zealous, and learned men. The 
ground of this ill-success it is not easy to 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



13 



assign ; but the evidence of general failure 
may be given in the revival of the old 
theory of Gregory by the latest writer,* 
his brief volume being an attempt to re- 
establish the typical connection between 
Job and our Lord, while the first glance 
shows the most irreconcileable contradic- 
tion between the nature, the condition, 
the career, and the final purposes of both. 
Job, a husband and father, a man of 
great opulence and station, on his trial 
impeaching the justice of God, cursing the 
hour of his birth, and longing to die, — at 
length, rebuked by the Almighty, awak- 
ened to the confession of sin, forced to the 
acknowledgment of his own '"vileness," "re- 
penting in dust and ashes/' and only on 
that avowal restored ; closing his course 
in superior wealth and renown, surrounded 

* The Reverend J. E. Kempe, Rector of St James's, 
London. 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



by his family, and living through a long 
series of prosperous years. What parallel- 
ism can exist between this powerful and 
prosperous man and Jesus of Nazareth, 
born in humiliation and living in obscu- 
rity, " not having where to lay his head " — 
between Job, a sinner, and suffering for his 
own sin, and Jesus, sinless, and suffering for 
the sin of mankind ; Job, restored to the 
fullest enjoyment of the world, and Jesus, 
on the cross completing his mission to 
the world ? 

On a review of these theories, it is evi- 
dent that they are all contradictory, that 
they are all conjectural, that they sub- 
stantiate nothing, and that they give no 
satisfactory answer to any one of the three 
questions, Why Job was afflicted % why 
his history was written % and why that 
history was placed in the Bible % 

If the solution in this volume is sue- 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



15 



cessful, a result strongly connected with 
the honour of the Church will be gained, 
and one of the proverbial " opprobria 
theologica" removed. 

I now give a brief sketch of the history 
of Job, with observations upon the author- 
ship of the Book, and some remarkable 
incidents and expressions of the narrative, 
and then proceed to develop my theory of 
the interpretation of this most interesting, 
curious, and, as I believe, most important, 
portion of Scripture. 



CHAPTER II. 



THE HISTORY OF JOB. 

There was a man in the Land of Uz 
whose name was Job, of great wealth and 
high character : his wealth was pastoral, 
and he had also a " very great household/' 
so that this man was " the greatest of all 
the men of the East/' 

He had seven sods and three daughters, 
settled in their own houses, who met and 
feasted together ; and after those stated 
days of feasting, Job sacrificed for them, 
and sanctified them all. 

There was a day when the angels ap- 
peared before the Lord, and Satan came 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



17 



among them ; and on being questioned 
whether he had any charge to bring against 
J ob, a a perfect and an upright man, one that 
feared God" Satan denied that his piety 
was real, declaring that it was founded 
solely on his prosperity. " Doth Job fear 
God for nought? But put forth thine 
hand and touch all that he hath, and he 
will curse thee to thy face."' Satan is then 
permitted to put him to the test, and de- 
stroy all that he possesses. In one day 
his flocks and herds are destroyed ; and 
his ten children, feasting together in their 
elder brother s house, are also destroyed 
by a tempest which crushed them in its 
ruins. Job feels the weight of his calami- 
tie-, but without losing his patience. He 
rends his robe and shaves his head in sign 
of mourning, but he worships in resigna- 
tion. " The Lord gave, and the Lord hath 
taken away ; blessed be the name of the 

B 



18 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



Lord." Satan was baffled ; his knowledge 
was put to shame in the presence of the 
angels ; but his malignity still persevered. 

Again a day came, when Satan appeared 
before the Lord. He then declared that 
Job's trial had been imperfect ; that any 
man might bear the loss of wealth and off- 
spring, but that the true test of patience 
w T as personal suffering. He was then per- 
mitted to inflict that suffering, though not 
to touch the life of Job. So he went forth 
and " smote him with sore boils, from the 
sole of his foot unto his crown." 

Job, now in the double suffering of 
poverty and pain, is rebuked by his wife, 
the sole being who has remained with 
him. " Dost thou still retain thine in- 
tegrity \ [sense of duty.] Curse God, and 
die." Job rejects this guilty advice, and 
asks, " What ! shall we receive good at the 
hand of Gfod, and shall we not receive 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



19 



evil 1 " It is then pronounced that thus 
far " did not Job sin with his lips/ 5 

Three of his friends, hearing of his cal- 
amity, come " to mourn with him, and to 
comfort him." Unprepared for the depth 
of his misfortune, they lose all power of 
consolation ; but rend their mantles, 
sprinkle dust on their heads, weep beside 
him, and sit in silence for seven days, as 
if mourning for the dead. 

After these seven days the feelings of 
Job seem to undergo a total change. His 
patience is gone. He no longer uses the 
language of resignation — no longer regards 
the Almighty as the wise distributor of 
good and ill. To his new conception God 
is simply the possessor of irresistible power, 
wielded by arbitrary will, and disregard- 
ing alike the merits of man and the justice 
of Heaven. His friends, now evidently 
startled by the violence of his despair, 



20 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



rebuke his impeachment of Providence, 
and successively argue that the Almighty 
is incapable of injustice. At length Job 
closes his vindication by recounting the 
virtues of his career ; and his friends, now 
evidently hopeless of conviction, contend 
no more. Elihu, a bystander, then, speak- 
ing in a tone of authority, as if commis- 
sioned to rebuke all the disputants, charges 
Job with self - righteousness, error with 
respect to the ways of Providence, and 
with the imputation of injustice to the 
Almighty ; asserting his right to advise 
on the ground of superior knowledge, or 
(as the text may be interpreted) on the 
direct impulse of inspiration. "Multitude 
of years should teach wisdom. But there 
is a spirit in men ; and the inspiration of 
the Almighty giveth them understanding/' 
It is observable that there is no similar 
reference to inspiration in any of the 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



21 



former arguments, though Eliphaz had 
seen a spirit in his dream — and heard him 
proclaiming the divine j ustice. He directly 
charges Job with presumption ; " for Job 
hath said, I am righteous" He then illus- 
trates, in a variety of arguments, the 
original error of conceiving that calami- 
ties are necessarily punishments ; proving 
that, in the hand of Providence, they may 
be only interpositions to awaken good 
men from habitual prejudices, which, cher- 
ished, might at some future period lead 
to ruin. 

The voice of God himself confirms this 
doctrine of Providence. Job is converted, 
acknowledges his previous ignorance, con- 
fesses his sin, and abandons his self- 
righteousness, exclaiming, " / am vile ; 
wherefore 1 abhor myself, and repent in 
dust and ashes/' 

He is forgiven on this confession, is 



22 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



commanded to offer sacrifice for the error 
of his friends, and is restored to health, 
and to twofold his former opulence. His 
friends and countrymen give him gifts ; 
he has ten other children ; his three 
daughters are of pre-eminent beauty, and 
have inheritances of their own. Job sur- 
vives his trial a hundred and forty years, 
and sees his posterity to the fourth gene- 
ration. 



CHAPTER III. 



THE COUNTRY, ORIGIN, AND TIME OF JOB. 

On those subjects much labour has been 
exhausted without much profit. But what 
detail can be expected in genealogies and 
narratives unfurnished with any contem- 
porary documents \ Our only guide can be 
the slight notices contained in the rapid 
narratives of Scripture. 

Job is a dweller in the Land of Uz. In 
Genesis the name of Uz is twice mentioned; 
first as a descendant of Shem, and next, in 
a subsequent generation, as a son of Nahor 
by his wife Milcah. The descendants of 
Shem (Genesis x. 30) had their dwelling 



2i 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



" from Mesha, as thou goest to Sephar, 
a mount of the East/' We have the prin- 
cipal names which occur in the history of 
Job located in the same region — a land 
by the geographer Ptolemy named Auritis, 
separated from Chaldea by a mountain- 
ridge. Here were settled the several tribes 
or individuals named Tenia, Dedan, Buz, i 
Shuah. and Uz. The country was desig- 
nated the East, evidently with reference 
to the position of Palestine. 

The time of Job is still more involved ; 
every commentator wanders over the field 
of chronology, and with nearly equal incer- 
titude. The learned Kennicott assumes 
Job to have been contemporary with 
Amram, the father of Moses, whom he con- 
ceives to have lived in the same period 
with Eliphaz the Temanite, according to 
the following genealogy : — 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



25 



Abraham. 

i 

Isaac. 

i 

i i 

Esau. Jacob. 
Eliphaz. Levi. 
Teman. Kohath. 
Eliphaz the Temanite. Amram — Job. 

Moses. 



Lee supposes Job to have lived in the 
period of the twelve sons of Jacob, to have 
been forty-two years old at the time of 
the settlement in Egypt, and to have died 
forty-seven years before the Exodus. But 
as accuracy on these points is hopeless, 
further statements are of no value, and 
the subject is fortunately of comparative 
unimportance. 



♦ 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE AUTHORSHIP. 



The question, " "Who was the writer of 
the Book V is a point of higher considera- 
tion, and has been one of not less frequent 
dispute. It has been occasionally attri- 
buted to nearly all the leading characters 
of Scripture. Lightfoot gives it to Elihu ; 
Renwick, Good, and Michaelis to Moses ; 
Warburton to Ezra ! Lowth and Mao-ee 

o 

to Job himself ; yet all those investigators 
have omitted some considerations arising 
from the Book itself, and nearly leading 
to the decision. The closing portion, re- 
lating to the death of Job, of course, must 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



27 



have been transmitted by another pen ; 
but the former portion could not, from its 
very substance, have been the authorship 
of the same pen with the dialogue. The 
natural difference between the language 
of passionate argument and mere narra- 
tive may be admitted; but it is evident 
that throughout the dialogue Job had not 
the slightest conception of the actual con- 
ditions of his trial. 

The extraordinary scene in which Satan 
was suffered to charge him could be known 
only by revelation. Yet there is no re- 
ference to revelation in the dialogue : if 
it were known at the time, it must have 
changed the entire tenor of the arguments 
on both sides. Job regards his sufferings 
simply as the arbitrary exercise of irre- 
sistible power ; his friends regard them 
as the natural consequence of secret sin. 
If they could have been known as the 



28 THE BOOK OF JOB. 

challenge to his fortitude, or the test of his 
faith — that his antagonist was the enemy 
of man, and his spectators angels — we 
might have heard some complaining of 
the fearful severity of the temptation, but 
we should certainly have heard no im- 
peachment of the divine justice. As the 
conflict advanced, we might have wit- 
nessed the magnificence of the human mind 
when expanded to its highest vigour by the 
encounter with a superhuman adversary — 
the passion and power of a great nature 
stirred through all its depths by a spiri- 
tual struggle in the sioht of earth and 
heaven. But there would have been no 
final contrition, no necessary humiliation, 
no voluntary covering of head and heart 
with dust and ashes : the struo-orle would 
have been a source of pride, and the suc- 
cess a pledge of perpetual honour. 

Even if the revelation had followed the 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



29 



trial, could the dialogue have ever been 
written — could we have had those unfold- 
ings of ignorance, those developments of 
error, those exposures of the wickedness 
of the heart, those challenges to the divine 
power recorded, which that revelation 
showed to have grown out of the mere 
weaknesses of men \ 

The authorship of the dialogue has been 
variously assigned to Moses, Solomon, and 
Elihu ; Lowth, Magee, and Lee assign it 
to Job himself, and with apparent reason. 
In the first place, no sufficient foundation 
has been laid for the claims of any other. 
In the next, who but Job himself could 
have ventured on the subject ? The man of 
doubled wealth and power, and still more 
distinguished by the personal conference 
with the Almighty, must by his contem- 
porary generations have been held almost in 
the rank of a sacred being. Who else could 



so 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



have ventured to describe the agonies of 
such a mind, his defiance of the divine 
judgment, the bitterness of his wrath, or 
the sullenness of his despair, the haughti- 
ness of his heart, and the prostration of 
his self-confidence ! 

Yet what duty could be more congenial 
to a subdued spirit than to bequeath to 
his country a record of the divine dealing 
with himself ; to lay open the latent in- 
firmity of his nature : make a full con- 
fession of his errors, passions, and pre- 
judices ; and at once make atonement 
for the waywardness of his nature in the 
fulness of his confession, and render an 
open and penitential homage to the pro- 
tecting and restoring; benevolence of the 
Disposer of all things ? 

That his ability was equal to the pro- 
duction of such a record — of condensing 
the vagueness of its illustrations into force. 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



31 



and combining them in to form — is evident; 
that, once sent forth, it would be trea- 
sured as a noble relic of patriarchal wis- 
dom ; and that at some subsequent period 
its history would have been explained and 
authenticated by some prophet or servant 
of revelation, is scarcely more than the 
natural course of great providential docu- 
ments. Moses, the husband of the daugh- 
ter of the Midianitish chieftain, might be 
the natural depository of such a document 
during his forty years' life in the desert ; 
and the illumination which so pre-emi- 
nently flowed on his inspired understand- 
ing might have given him the knowledge 
of those high transactions reserved only 
for the spiritual world. 

The petulance of foreign scepticism, fol- 
lowed by the shallowness of some theo- 
logians among ourselves, has laboured to 
dilute Job's temptation into a myth or a 



82 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



metaphor. But Christianity gives an in- 
stance of Satanic temptation distinctly 
refuting all these childish dexterities. 
" Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to 
have you [all the apostles], that he might 
sift you [all] as wheat. But T have prayed 
for thee, that thy faith fail not [finally] ; 
and when thou art converted, strengthen 
thy brethren" (Luke xxii. 32). The temp- 
tation acted visibly in the general desertion 
of Jesus by the apostles — the final effect 
of the prayer in the penitence of Peter and 
the restoration of faith to the apostles, with 
the one fearful exception ; and the power 
of Satan was exhibited visibly in the inve- 
terate evil and final ruin of that one. It is 
scarcely possible to conceive a more prac- 
tical instance of the visible action of the 
evil spirit in all its forms, of original temp- 
tation, of baffled malignity, and of persever- 
ing power. It is in complete consistency 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



33 



with this character, that a being of intense 
hostility, constantly roaming the world, 
u like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may 
devour/' should especially desire the de- 
struction of a powerful and opulent man 
in the fullest enjoyment of the world, 
and whose fall would involve at once 
the scandal of religion and. the ruin of 
the various multitude dependent on " the 
greatest man of all the East/' 



c 



CHAPTER V. 



THE EE A LIT Y OF JOB'S HISTOKY. 



This question, like all the rest, has been 
strongly debated under the different forms 
of allegory, poem, and drama. But all 
the references to Job are so strongly sur- 
rounded with Scriptural realities that they 
almost amount to certainty ; and if it shall 
be proved that J ob himself has an antitype, 
the question is at once decided. 

He is referred to in connection with 
Noah and Daniel. Of Noah and Daniel 
we have sufficient knowledge from the 
Scriptures, but of Job we have none ex- 
cept what his book contains. We are 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



35 



therefore virtually referred to this book ; 
but would the reference be possible in 
either the prophet or the apostle unless 
the history were true ? The Almighty is 
represented uttering words of high im- 
port to Job and his friends. If these 
words were fiction, what would equal the 
profanity of the invention, or how could 
such a document find its way into the 
canon of Scripture % There is no reason 
to doubt that it found a place in the canon 
at an early period. It had the same autho- 
rity as the other books in the opinion of 
the early Jews. The Septuagint gave its 
translation two centuries and a half before 
the Christian Era. Josephus refers to it 
as authentic ; Philo quotes it. It is imi- 
tated by Baruch, and the subject is re- 
ferred to in the Book of Tobit. 

In the catalogue of canonical books 
drawn up by Melito, Bishop of Sardis, in 



36 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



the second century, it is inserted after 
the " Song of Songs" on the supposition 
that it was written by Solomon. Jerome 
introduced it into the Vulgate, and it is 
quoted by almost all the Fathers. The 
Talmud places it after the Book of 
Psalms ; thus Jews and Christians equally 
acknowledge its canonicity. " All Scrip- 
ture is by inspiration of God/' "Search 
the Scriptures," is the divine command. 

A curious astronomical calculation has 
been proposed as ascertaining the age in 
which Job lived, which it conceives to 
have been about 2337 years before the 
Christian Era, the Deluge being B.C. 3155, 
and the calling of Abraham B.C. 2153. 
But this calculation takes it for granted 
that the cardinal constellations of spring 
and autumn in the time of Job were 
Taurus and Scorpio, a matter which can- 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 37 

not now be proved (Hale's Chronology, 
vol. ii. p. 58). 

It has been objected to the reality of the 
dialogue, that it makes no allusion to the 
wars of Canaan, to the captivity under 
Chedorlaomer, or to the catastrophe of the 
Cities of the Plain. But, memorable as 
these transactions were, they occurred cen- 
turies before the probable period of Job. 
The dialogue has an object which did not 
necessarily demand the allusion. How 
seldom have the prophetic writings at- 
tended to any facts beyond their imme- 
diate purpose! and how hopeless would it 
be to search St Pauls Epistles for details 
of the reign of Nero, or allusions to the 
republican convulsions of Eome ! Still 
there are signs of reality. The names 
and countries of Job's three friends are 
Scriptural. Eliphaz dwelt in Teman, a 



38 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



district or city of Iclumea (Jeremiah 
xlix. 7) ; Bilclad in Shuah, a district of 
Arabia (Genesis xxvi. 2) ; Zopliar in 
Naamah, a district or city of Idumea 
(Joshua xii. 2) ; Elihu is also of Idumea ; 
Uz is also recorded as connected with 
Idumea (Jeremiah xxv. 20). Thus the 
vicinage of the land of Job seems to be 
decided, though, in the vagaries of ancient 
topography, the " East " may express a 
region of undefined limits, and extend- 
ing from the borders of Palestine to the 
Euphrates. 

An Arab tradition appended to the 
Septuagint supposes Job to have been a 
descendant of Esau, to have originally 
been named Jobab, and to have reigned 
as the successor of Balak ; but this tradi- 
tion is wholly unsupported. 

The obvious rule of identity is, close 
adherence to locality, peculiarity of man- 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



39 



ners, and originality of customs. This rule 
we find remarkably observed in the entire 
history. The locality of Job is nearly 
Arabian ; and all the allusions, the life, and 
the scenery of the dialogue are Arabian : 
the desert, with its boundless and drearv 
expansion, its sudden storms and burning 
sands, its exhausted and solitary wells, its 
trains of caravans, its camels, ostriches, 
and robber tribes — all in the most distinct 
contrast with the travels of Abraham and 
the residence of the Israelites amono- the 
harvest-fields of Egypt, the vintage-grounds 
of western Canaan, and the perpetual fer- 
tility of the south of Palestine. 

The worship offered by Job belongs to a 
primitive age. There is no tabernacle, no 
form, and no priest ; it is wholly sacrificial, 
and the sacrifice is for his family. The 
father is the sacrificer. 

The habits of the age of Job differ con- 



40 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



siderably from those of Canaan and Chal- 
dea, as exhibited in the history of Abraham. 

There is no reference to polygamy, to 
slavery, or to concubinage. 

There is none to idolatry, nor to any 
false worship but that of the sun and 
moon. 

There is no homage to kings, or that 
prostration of person or mind which was 
among the earliest habits of the East. 

There is no reference to courts, war, or 
armies; the only hostilities an incursion of 
w T ild tribes for plunder. 

The distinctions are still more remark- 
able in religion. The Abrahamic religion re- 
garded the Almighty as scarcely more than 
a ministering Angel — a guide always to be 
obeyed, and a teacher always to be believed. 
Job's conception of Deity is of a higher 
rank — abstract, solemn, and magnificent. 
Except in the single instance of disputing 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



41 



the divine justice, he bows down before the 
Omniscience and Omnipotence of the Lord 
of AIL 

The years of Job are patriarchal. The 
longevity of the patriarchs had been gra- 
dually diminishing from the Deluge. Job's 
friends lament the rapid shortening of life, 
in contrasting their own time with that of 
their fathers. It is remarkable that there 
was no diminution of life before the Deluge. 
There were differences of years, but Methu- 
selah, only a single generation before Xoah, 
lived the longest of all, 969 years ; Shem, 
born 100 years before the Deluge, lived 
after it 502 years. The diminution was 
thenceforth rapid, but with some degree of 
regularity. Terah, the father of Abraham, 
lived 205 years; Abraham, 175; Jacob, 
157. Hebrew tradition supposes Job, at 
the time of his trial, to have been seventy 
years old — a probable conjecture, since at 



42 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



that period he had possessed an acknow- 
ledged rank in his country, great opulence, 
and had settled his ten sons and daughters 
in lands of their own. The 140 years after 
his restoration would extend his life to 
210 years. 



CHAPTEE VI. 



THE TRIAL OF JOB. 



Why was Job afflicted ? is a question na- 
turally arising from his history, but which 
has never received a satisfactory answer. 
The common suggestion, that it was for 
the purpose of example, is evidently un- 
tenable. To submit one man to suffering 
for the edification of another is incom- 
patible with justice. The true reason of 
his trial appears to have been the necessity 
of making him acquainted with his own 
heart. He was self-righteous. The char- 
acter of uprightness and fear of God given 
to him in the commencement of the his- 



44 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



tory is evidently nothing more than the 
general estimate of his country. That this 
character was not real, is subsequently put 
beyond denial by his despair, violent anger, 
and reckless impeachment of Heaven. This 
stubborn sense of his own merit puts an 
end to the reasonings of his friends : " so 
those three men ceased to answer Job, be- 
cause he was righteous in his own eyes" 
(xxx. 11). 

This grievous error forms the direct 
ground of Elihu's charge — " Thinkest thou 
this to be right, that thou sayest, 6 My 
righteousness is more than God's? ' for thou 
saidst, ' What advantage will it be unto 
thee \ 9 and ' what profit shall I have if I be 
cleansed from my sin % ' " 

Still Job was a good man, in the general 
sense of the word, and as such was fav- 
oured by the Almighty, and was deemed 
worthy of that higher knowledge which 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



45 



can be taught only by divine means. Like 
the young man in the Gospel, " he was not 
far from the kingdom of heaven. " As self- 
ishness is the origin of all the vices, self- 
righteousness is the antagonist of all the 
virtues. Ignorance of our own disease is 
the great obstacle to our recovery. The 
full conviction of our moral enmity is 
essential to our divine reconciliation. The 
purest prayer ever offered by man is, " God 
be merciful to me a sinner" 

This prayer Job had never made, nor 
did he know how to make. He had borne 
his suffering with the manliness of his 
nature ; he had yet to learn the nobler 
manliness of the softened spirit. He has 
all the external strength of habit, fortunate 
circumstances, and high-toned tempera- 
ment, but he wants the spring of a still 
more unyielding energy within. He has 
fortitude, but not faith. He is the hero of 



46 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



endurance, but not the martyr. Still un- 
convinced of sin, lie was unfitted to receive 
the holy vigour of Humility. To such 
minds the world is full of temptation ; and 
it may have been for the immediate pur- 
pose of saving him from some irresistible 
temptation that the lesson of his suffering 
was given. 

Unexampled as the condition of Job was, 
his character is common. We daily see 
men, of vigorous intellect and blameless 
conduct, with no more knowledge of their 
own hearts than if they had none in their 
bosoms ; going through the round of life 
in integrity and intelligence, yet with no 
more sense of moral responsibility — of that 
watching eye that is above all, or that 
dread account which all must give — than 
the cattle in the fields. Yet it is not de- 
nied that these men are valuable members 
of society; many of them lights to their 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



47 



generation; some perhaps necessary to the 
wellbeing of the "world. But their sole 
guide is propriety ! They live in an at- 
mosphere of public decorum, public respect, 
and public responsibility. Nothing can 
turn them to the right or left, but they 
never lift their eyes from the ground. Such 
men are not necessarily hypocrites, but they 
are never sincere. They may not fall into 
temptation, but they are in perpetual peril ; 
and if they fall, they are undone. They 
add to the slippery shrines of statesman- 
ship, to the firebrands of faction ; or escape 
only with blasted character to obscurity, 
there to despair and die. Some may de- 
scend to the grave in peace; some even 
may lie within a tomb consecrated by pub- 
lic honours ; but their idol was propriety. 
The whole class have no other God in this 
world. 



CHAPTER VII. 



WHY WAS THE HISTOEY WRITTEN? 



The Almighty lias never " left himself 
without witness." From the beginning of 
the world he has assisted the lessons of 
instinct, necessity, and moral feeling, by the 
successive teachings of patriarchal revela- 
tion, Judaism, and Christianity ; all in vis- 
ible adaptation to the successive advances 
of society, and the more general education 
of mankind. In conformity to this adap- 
tation, the ruder ages of the primitive 
world appear to have been furnished with 
a species of teaching by example, suited to 
impress the difficult structure of their mind. 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



49 



In proof that this order of teaching 
was by divine design, all its instances 
have a characteristic similitude. 

Each example is taken from the most 
conspicuous individual of the generation. 

Each is spread over the largest space of 
society in its day. 

Each is distinctly separate in its nature. 

Each is especially appropriate to its age. 

Each has its own age, no two appear- 
ing; together. 

All are of the highest general import- 
ance to the world. 

This view is necessarily limited to the 
Ages after the Fall. The crime of our 
first parents can give no lesson, as it can 
have no future commission. The para- 
disaic state, half-angelic, sustained "with- 
out labour and untouched by sin, can 
have no practical wisdom and no avail- 
able experience for our struggling, bewil- 

D 



50 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



clerecl, and infirm career. The true history 
of the human race begins with the expul- 
sion from paradise. 

The first act of blood — the murder of 
Abel — would, according to the usual 
conceptions of human justice, have been 
punished by death. But if the purpose 
of the punishment was to give a lesson to 
primitive mankind, what could have been 
more effectual than perpetuity of banish- 
ment joined with perpetuity of wander- 
ing, and this perpetuity of wandering 
enforced by the misery of the curse of 
double barrenness on the ground wher- 
ever the guilty footstep trod \ In the first 
ages, the danger of homicide, from the 
fierce passions and dreary labours of man, 
must have required the strongest prohi- 
bition. If Cain had died by the hand of 
Heaven or the hand of man, the example 
of his punishment would have been com- 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 51 

paratively lost. But what could be a 
deeper warning against bloodshed than 
the misery of his guarded life — the per- 
petual suffering of the first-born of the 
human race — the heir of the world, strip- 
ped of his birthright, roaming the earth 
like a wild beast, and, like the wild beast, 
living on the roots and scanty produce 
which the earth, under its doubled curse 
of barrenness, almost refused to his hun- 
ger — a homeless savage set forth for the 
avoidance of man by the visible mark of 
Heaven % 

The full effect of this terrible sentence 
is suppressed in the succinctness of ante- 
diluvian history ; but we know that, even 
in the fifth generation, the sentence was 
stated as a general prohibition of homicide. 
" If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly 
Lamech seventy and seven fold ;; (Genesis 
iv. 24). 



52 THE BOOK OF JOB. 

Enoch, in the seventh generation from 
Adam, " prophesied, sa) r ing, The Lord 
cometh with ten thousand of his saints, to 
execute judgment upon all, and to con- 
vince all that are ungodly among them 
of all their ungodly deeds" (Jude 14, 15). 
Of the results of his warning we have no 
direct knowledge. But "Enoch walked 
with God, and was not, for God took him." 

Milton not improbably conceives him 
to have been protected by miracle from 
the violence of one of the furious assem- 
blages of his time of cureless profligacy : — 

" Of middle age, one rising eminent, 
In wise deport, spake much of right and wrong, 
Of justice, of religion, truth, and peace, 
And judgment from above : him old and young- 
Exploded, and had seized with violent hands, 
Had not a cloud, descending, snatched him thence 
Unseen amid the throng."* 

The prediction was fulfilled within the 
third generation by the Deluge. 

* Paradise Lost, book xi. 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



53 



In conformity to the divine rule, this 
teacher was the most conspicuous man of 
his age, by birth the head of the Sethite 
family, and to all generations more con- 
spicuous in the confirmation of teaching, 
by being carried up in the body, and thus 
rescued from the general dominion of mor- 
tality. If the guilt of mankind was ap- 
proaching to that universal corruption 
which required the vengeance of the Del- 
uge for the purification of the globe, what 
could be more directly calculated to im- 
press the general understanding than a 
declaration of divine judgment given by 
the head of the Sethite race, and con- 
firmed by the visible evidence of a state 
beyond the grave \ 

The next lesson was also given by the 
most conspicuous man of the earth, the 
head of the Sethite line, named by pro- 
phecy, and an especial minister of Heaven, 



54 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



" Noah," a preacher of righteousness. The 
lesson was given in the building of the 
ark — naturally a more practical appeal to 
the alarms of men than preaching or pre- 
diction. The duration of the divine long- 
suffering was limited to an hundred and 
twenty years ; and probably the building 
of this enormous house of life occupied not 
less time. The population of the earth 
seems to have been narrow before the 
Deluge, and was evidently gathered near 
the same locality. Thus the building of 
the ark and the preaching of Noah were 
known to all mankind. The warning was 
thus given under the circumstances most 
fitted to strike conviction. Both were 
wasted on an infidel world. 

The unfilial insult of one of the sons 
of Noah to his father was punished by a 
divine malediction on his son Canaan, he 
being especially mentioned, probably as 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



55 



coming into future contact with the Jews, 
and thus perpetuating among the chosen 
people the especial memory of the ancestral 
transgression, " Cursed be Canaan ; a ser- 
vant of servants shall he be unto his 
brethren/' The curse of slavery seems to 
have extended, more or less, to all Africa, 
peopled as it was by the posterity of Ham. 

In an Era when patriarchal or paternal 
government was the only one provided for 
nations, irreverence to paternal authority 
must have endangered all society ; and in 
this instance the warning was also given 
in its most impressive form — the degrada- 
tion of one of the three most conspicuous 
of men, the inheritor of a third part of the 
globe. 

About the fifth century after the Deluge, 
the birth of the patriarch Phaleg (Division) 
gave the prophetic sign that the family of 
Noah was to divide and spread over the 



56 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



globe. The divine intention had been 
declared even before the Deluge in the 
birth of the sons Shem, Ham, and Japhet, 
the only instance of three contemporaneous 
names in the patriarchal descent. The 
divine movement was resisted by the popu- 
lation, headed by a son of Cush the son 
of Ham — a man conspicuous by his birth, 
and also by his prowess in the destruction 
of wild beasts, the first necessary display 
of public service in the early ages. To 
prohibit the dispersion he gathered the 
population into cities. The Almighty ex- 
tinguished this resistance by a high and 
new expedient, which at once baffled the 
human design and promoted the divine 
purpose. He broke up the universal lan- 
guage into that diversity of tongues wirich 
now divides nations, and stigmatised the 
author of the resistance by the name of 
Rebel (Nimrod), and his chief city by the 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



57 



name of Confusion (Babel). The history 
of this most memorable interposition is 
given in the tenth and eleventh chapters 
of Genesis, the former stating the order of 
the dispersion, and the latter assigning 
the cause. In this instance the providen- 
tial rule was strictly observed. The warn- 
ing was of the highest necessity to the 
replenishing of the earth. The culprit, 
both from his birth and personal distinc- 
tion, was perhaps the most conspicuous 
man of his age ; and the changes of lan- 
guage impressed the perpetuity and uni- 
versality of the lesson of obedience in all 
things to the divine will. 

When the period approached at which, 
to meet the advancing intelligence of man- 
kind, a visible church was to be planted 
on the earth, another great appropriate 
lesson was given in the call of Abraham — 
his migration fromChaldea, and his commu- 



58 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



nications with the Almighty. Apparently 
for the first time, Faith was impressed in 
direct form on mankind. Abraham was 
the living representation of faith. He left 
the birthplace of his line in reliance on 
a divine promise, travelled through the 
hazards of Egypt and Canaan in the same 
reliance, and died in the same unshaken 
reliance. Doubtless he might have fixed 
his settlement in Egypt, where its king, 
Pharaoh, loaded him with wealth ; or in 
Salem, where its king,Melckizedek, " blessed 
him ; " or in Gerar. where its king, Abime- 
lech, gave him royal presents, and he was 
protected by miracle. But he was still a 
" dweller in tents/' with no possession in 
the land but the grave of Sarah in Hebron. 
His whole life was thus the lesson. His 
emigration with Terah, the head of the 
Sethite line, from Chaldea, must have been 
an object of general knowledge to the 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



59 



country ; his divine call must have fixed 
the eye of every land through which he 
passed. His life was long — an hundred 
and seventy-five years. To the last he 
seems to have been "a dweller in tents." 
His characteristic was Faith. Wherever 
he went with his household and his flocks 
he must have been known as the man 
travelling under a divine promise. His 
travels were the proclamation of faith, and 
his conviction of the lordship of Canaan 
was continued through his descendants for 
four hundred and thirty years, often as it 
must have been scoffed at by the Philistine 
and the Egyptian. This was its pilgrim- 
age ; the possession of Canaan realised its 
triumph to the living world. 

In the ao;e of Job the idea seems to 
have been unquestioned, that Calamity 
was evidence of crime. The nature of 
calamity is the whole substance of the 



60 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



dialogue, Job and his friends alike un- 
hesitatingly conceiving misfortune in all 
its shapes to be the angry infliction of 
Heaven, but Job, doubting its justice in 
such cases as his own, vindicating his own 
character from any crime deserving of his 
affliction. The argument of his friends, on 
the contrary, maintains that, God being 
incapable of injustice, Job must have com- 
mitted secret crimes, and therefore that 
his only hope of restoration must be found 
in repentance. 

The prevalence of an error of this kind 
evidently strikes at the whole peace of 
society. 

Misfortune is thickly strewn through the 
world ; the belief that misfortune was a 
proof of crime, however concealed, must 
excite unusual suspicions, probably ending 
in universal hostility. It would deny the 
value of one of the most practical and 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



61 



benevolent of all precepts — "Judge not, 
that ye be not judged." It would chill all 
sympathy in affliction, for who could ven- 
ture to interpose in the divine judgment ? 
The lives of the noblest among men, ex- 
hausted in the noblest services to mankind, 
have often been a lono; succession of suffer- 
ing:. Where would be the honour of the 
patriot, the hero, and the martyr, sanctify- 
ing the dungeon, giving splendour to the 
field, and glory to the flame ? Establish 
the maxim, and who would defend the 
wronged, relieve the impoverished, console 
the unhappy, or restore the undone ? Even 
now the world is not slow to pass sentence 
on the unfortunate ; and even if the strong 
instincts of our nature resisted this frigid 
connection, how frequently would it come 
in aid of our indolence, and supply a pre- 
text for our parsimony or our pride \ Who 
could perform the great practical com- 



62 



THE BOOK OF JOE. 



mand, " Fear not them which kill the body, 
but are not able to kill the soul " % The 
apostle, u dying daily/' would have been but 
the darker criminal, and the infant church 
put to shame by the very acts preparing 
for it the crown of immortality. 

The history of Job meets all the requisi- 
tions of the general rule of divine teaching 
in the primitive ages. He was the most 
conspicuous man of his country — " the 
greatest man of all the East." His suffering 
arose from his individual circumstances, 
but its lesson was for the world. That 
lesson conveyed the affirmation of a great 
practical truth, that God is always just ; 
and the negation of a great practical error, 
that calamity has a necessary connection 
with crime. The restoration of his rank 
and opulence at once proved that his suffer- 
ing was not the effect of personal crime, 
and that his lesson was complete. Both 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



63 



the suffering and the restoration must have 
been universally known in his country, and 
both were confirmatory of the public lesson. 
His longevity must have aided the con- 
tinuance of that lesson, and may have been 
given for that continuance. If, from its 
remoteness and locality, his history was 
exposed to the hazard of being forgotten ; 
from its being placed in the canon of Scrip- 
ture, in the fulness of its argument and 
narrative, it was preserved for all pos- 
terity. 

In the following ages the divine teaching 
appeared under another form. Men were 
no longer grouped in clans, moulded by the 
characters of their chief individuals. The 
instruments of the Jewish dispensation were 
publicity of national law, regularity of 
national worship, and the visible action of 
the Almighty. The patriarchal tent was 
exchanged for the city; and the altar by 



64 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



the well, or under the shade of the forest, 
was replaced by the temple on Moriah. 

The Christian dispensation exhibited the 
same teaching, but in a more vigorous, 
lofty, and yet flexible form. Its worship 
was no longer limited to one temple, or its 
religion to one nation ; its temple was the 
globe, and its religion was sent forth to all 
mankind, inheriting the promises of the 
first Eevelation, and possessing the power of 
the last. Its character was Universality 
— the calling of all the earth into " one fold 
under one Shepherd," the visible fulfilment 
of all the types, symbols, and prophecies in 
one mighty sacrifice, the faith of Abraham 
expanding into the faith of the Saviour and 
God of All. 



CHAPTER 



VIII. 



THE DIALOGUE. 



In giving the summary of the argument, the 
authorised version is sufficient for the pur- 
pose of illustration. It is clear, and generally 
close to the original. No other translation 
has been able to supersede it; and having 
been made at a time when the language was 
still unencumbered with foreign idioms, it 
ranks among the highest specimens of Scrip- 
tural translation. Lee and Mason Good 
have each published an elaborate critical 
volume, comprehending all the varieties of 
verbal translation, supported by English 
and foreign scholarship; but the changes 

E 



66 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



are slight, and the improvements unim- 
portant. The authorised translation still 
retains its rank, and deserves to retain it, 
for its integrity. 

In the first chapter of the dialogue, Job, 
relinquishing at once his patience, his faith, 
and his fortitude, sinks into the deepest 
despair. His three friends, who have been 
awe-struck with the sense of his sufferings, 
now startled by the violence of his lan- 
guage, attempt at once to console, to warn, 
and to reclaim him. Eliphaz reminds him 
of his habitual character for sense and 
courage. u Behold, thou hast instructed 
many, and thou hast strengthened the 
weak hands : but now it is come upon 
thee, and thou faintest; it toucheth thee, 
and thou art troubled/' He then proceeds 
to vindicate the divine justice, and strik- 
ingly illustrates his argument by the nar- 
ration of a supernatural visitation : — 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



67 



" Then a spirit passed before ray face ; 
the hair of my flesh stood up : it stood still, 
but I could not discern the form thereof. 
An image was before mine eyes ; there was 
silence, and I heard a voice saying, Shall 
mortal man be more just than God'? shall 
a man be more pure than his Maker? 
Behold, he put no trust in his servants, 
and his angels he charged with folly : 
how much less in them that dwell in 
houses of clay, whose foundation is in 
the dust ! " 

He then slightly refers to Job's sufferings 
as the result of hidden offence, exhorts to 
submission, and promises forgiveness from 
God. 

" Behold, happy is the man whom God 
correcteth: therefore despise not thou the 
chastening of the Almighty; for he maketh 
sore, and bindeth up; he woundeth, and 
his hands make whole/' 



68 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



(Chapter vi.) — Job still refuses consola- 
tion ; he asks only to die. 

" Oh that I might have my request ; and 
that God would grant me the thing that 
I long for ! even that it would please God 
to destroy me ; that he would let loose 
his hand, and cut me off! What is my 
strength, that I should hope % and what is 
mine end, that I should prolong my life \ 
Therefore I will not refrain my mouth ; I 
will speak in the bitterness of my soul." 

(Chapter viii.) — Bildad the Shuhite 
then speaks, vindicates the divine justice 
in the affliction of Job by an allusion to 
the loss of his children and his personal 
offences, and exhorts him to penitence. 

" Doth God pervert judgment % or doth 
the Almighty pervert justice ? If thy 
children have sinned against him, and he 
have cast them away for their transgres- 
sion ; if thou wouldest seek unto God be- 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



69 



times, and make thy supplication to the 
Almighty ; if thou wert pure and up- 
right ; surely now he would awake for 
thee, and make the habitation of thy 
righteousness prosperous." 

(Chapters ix., x.) — Job replies that it 
is impossible to contend with the power 
of God, and useless to argue against his 
will. " Behold, he taketh away, who 
can hinder him? Who will say unto 
him, What doest thou 1 How much less 
shall I answer him, and choose out my 
words to reason with him % For he is not 
a man, as I am, that I should answer 
him, and we should come together in 
judgment. My soul is weary of my life ; 
I will leave my complaint upon myself ; 
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. 
I will say unto God, Do not condemn me ; 
show me wherefore thou contendest with 
me. Are not my days few % Cease then, and 



70 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



let nie alone, that I may take comfort 
a little, before I go whence I shall not 
return, even to the land of darkness and 
the shadow of death." 

(Chapter xi.) — Zophar sternly upbraids 
Job for his obstinacy in conceiving him- 
self to be sinless. " Should thy lies make 
men hold their peace ? and when thou 
mockest, shall no man make thee ashamed'? 
For thou hast said, My doctrine is pure, 
and I am clean in thine eyes." He then 
affirms that his sufferings are the punish- 
ment of his sins. " Know therefore that 
God exacteth of thee less than thine ini- 
quity deserveth." He then urges him to 
confession and repentance. "If thou pre- 
pare thine heart, and stretch out thine 
hands toward him ; if iniquity be in 
thine hand, put it far away, and let not 
wickedness dwell in thy tabernacles. 
For then shalt thou lift up thy face with- 



THE BOOK OF JOB, 



71 



out spot : yea, thou shalt be steadfast, and 
shalt not fear : because thou shalt forget 
thy misery, and remember it as waters 
that pass away : and thine age shall be 
clearer than the noonday ; thou shalt 
shine forth, thou shalt be as the morn- 
mg." 

(Chapter xii.) — -Job answers indignantly 
— " Xo doubt but ye are the people, and 
wisdom shall die with you/' He then, 
acknowledging the pow T er of God, presump- 
tuously demands that he shall have a fair 
trial — " How many are mine iniquities 
and sins \ make me to know my transgres- 
sion and my sin. Wherefore hiclest thou thy 
face, and boldest me for thine enemy % 
Wilt thou break a leaf driven to and fro V } 
He pleads the brief existence of man, as 
rendering him an unfit object of divine 
conflict — 

'•'Man that is born of a woman is of 



72 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



few days, and full of trouble. He cometh 
forth like a flower, and is cut down : lie 
fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth 
not. And dost thou open thine eyes upon 
such an one, and bringest me into judg- 
ment with thee ? 

" 0 that thou wouldest hide nie in the 
grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, 
until thy wrath be past, that thou would- 
est appoint me a set time, and remember 
me ! 

(Chapter xv.) — Eliphaz repeats the 
charge of obstinacy. 

" Yea, thou castest off fear, and restrain- 
est prayer before God. For thy mouth utter- 
eth thine iniquity, and thou choosest the 
tongue of the crafty. Thine own mouth 
condemneth thee, and not I : yea, thine 
own lips testify against thee." 

(Chapter xvi.) — Job replies with scorn 
— " I have heard many such things : 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



73 



miserable comforters are ye all." He 
justifies himself — " My face is foul with 
weeping, and on mine eyelids is the 
shadow of death ; not for any injustice in 
mine hands : also my prayer is pure. 0 
earth, cover not thou my blood/ 5 

(Chapter xvii.) — "If I wait, the grave 
is mine house : I have made my bed in 
the darkness. I have said to corruption, 
Thou art my father : to the worm, Thou 
art my mother, and my sister. And where 
is now my hope \ as for my hope, who 
shall see it \ They shall go down to the 
bars of the pit, when our rest together is 
in the dust/' 

He recapitulates his sufferings, the de- 
sertion of his household, his relations, and 
his friends : " My kinsfolk have failed, and 
my familiar friends have forgotten me. 
Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, 
0 ye, my friends ; for the hand of God 



74 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



hath touched me. Why do ye persecute 
me as God ? ;; He then refers his vindica- 
tion to the Eedeemer : " For I know that 
my Eedeemer liveth, and that he shall 
stand at the latter day upon the earth." 

(Chapter xxix.) — He laments his former 
happiness and his public honour : " Oh 
that I were as in months past, as in the 
days when God preserved me ; when his 
candle shined upon my head, and w^hen by 
his light I walked through darkness ; as 
I w T as in the days of my youth, when the 
secret of God was upon my tabernacle ; 
w T hen the Almighty was yet with me, 
when my children were about ine. When 
the ear heard me, then it blessed me ; and 
when the eye saw me, it gave witness to 
me. ^ 

(Chapter xxxi.) — He finally gives a 
general view of his life, and contends for 
the perfect performance of his duties to 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



75 



God and man. " If I have walked with 
vanity, or if my foot hath hasted to deceit; 
let me be weighed in an even balance, that 
God may know mine integrity. 

" If I did despise the cause of my man- 
servant, or of my maid-servant, when they 
contended with me ; what then shall I do 
when God riseth up ? and when he visit- 
eth, what shall I answer him ? Did not he 
that made me in the womb make him % 

" If I have withheld the poor from their 
desire, or have caused the eyes of the 
widow to fail ; 

" If I have seen any perish for want of 
clothing, or any poor without covering ; 

" If I have lifted up my hand against 
the fatherless, when I saw my help in the 
gate; 

" If I have made gold my hope, or 
have said to the fine gold, Thou art my 
confidence ; 



76 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



" If I beheld the sun when it skined, or 
the moon walking in brightness, and my 
heart hath been secretly enticed, or my 
mouth hath kissed my hand ; 

" If I rejoiced at the destruction of him 
that hated me, or lifted up myself when 
evil found him ; 

" If I covered my transgressions as 
Adam, by hiding mine iniquity in my 
bosom ; 

" If my land cry against me, or that 
the furrows likewise thereof complain ; if 
I have eaten the fruits thereof without 
money, or have caused the owners thereof 
to lose their life : let thistles grow in- 
stead of wheat. The words of Job are 
ended." 

" So these men ceased to answer Job, 
because he was righteous in his own eyes. 
Then was kindled the wrath of Elihu : 
against Job was his wrath kindled, because 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



he justified himself rather than God ; also 
against his three friends was his wrath 
kindled, because they had found no an- 
swer, and yet had condemned Job." 

The remaining chapters are occupied 
with the expostulations of Elihu, the sen- 
tence of the Almighty, and the brief 
historical conclusion. The solution of the 
question of calamity by Elihu has been 
already stated, as amounting to the visita- 
tion of good men by misfortune, in mercy, 
for the awakening of the heart, for show- 
ing them the defects of their own nature, 
and for giving them the practical lesson 
of humility. So loug as Job says, "I am 
clean in heart from all transgression ; I 
am innocent, neither is there iniquity in 
me, ;; he is charged by Elihu with impiety : 
" Thou art not just ; God is greater than 
thou/' When Job at length comes to the 
confession, " I am vile/' he is forgiven and 



78 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



restored. " Then shall he pray unto God, 
and he will be favourable unto him, and 
he shall see his face with joy/' Elihu 
concludes the whole argument with an 
appeal to Job's understanding on the im- 
possibility of rationally attributing injus- 
tice to the Almighty. " Dost thou know 
the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous 
works of him who is perfect in knowledge \ 
Touching the Almighty, we cannot find 
him out. He is excellent in power, and 
in judgment, and in plenty [plenitude] 
of justice." The form of the argument 
here seems to be, injustice in man results 
from want of knowledge, want of wisdom, 
and want of means. What motive for 
acting unjustly can be conceived in a 
Being of infinite knowledge, wisdom, and 
power ? The 'perfection of God's nature 
renders injustice in Him impossible. 



CHAPTER IX. 



THE RESURRECTION. 



The declaration contained in the 19th 
chapter is well known to have been a sub- 
ject of controversy ; many distinguished 
names, as Grotius, Leclerc, Kennicott, Ro- 
senmtiller, Warburton, &c., conceiving it 
to imply no more than Job's restoration ; 
many of the fathers and the chief divines of 
our Church, on the other hand, conceiving 
it to be a distinct reference to the Resur- 
rection. Still, the only true opinion must 
be taken from Job's own words. From 
his first sentence to his last in the dialogue 
he never expresses the slightest hope of 



80 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



restoration. His is the language of de- 
spair equally unequivocal and unshaken. 
He believes himself doomed, he expects 
death, he even longs for death; he never 
reverts to his possessions, or his children, 
but to lament their loss. What language 
can be more decisive than this continued 
strain of hopeless anguish, " My days are 
extinct, the graves are ready for me " 1 
" Oh that I might have my request, and 
that God would grant me the thing that 
I long for : even that it would please God 
to destroy me ; that he would let loose 
his hand and cut me off, then should I vet 
have comfort/' Similar entreaties tran- 
spire, from time to time, through all his 
speeches, proving the fixed state of his 
convictions. 

Even when his friends suggest the idea 

CO 

of his restoration on repentance, as when 
Eliphaz says, " Despise not thou the chas- 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



81 



tenmgs of the Almighty, and thou shalt 
know that thy tabernacle shall be in peace, 
and thou shalt visit thy habitation, and 
not sin/' Job utterly rejects the thought 
of life. "My days are swifter than a 
weavers shuttle, and are spent without 
hope. Oh remember that my life is wind. 
Mine eye shall no more see good. The 
eye of him that hath seen me shall see me 
no more." Zophar offers the same hope 
on the same condition. " If iniquity be 
in thine hand, put it far away, and let not 
wickedness dwell in thy tabernacle ; for 
then shalt thou lift up thy face without 
spot : yea, thou shalt forget thy misery, 
and remember it as waters that pass away, 
and thine age shall be clearer than the 
noonday.'' Job resists this consolation as 
forcibly as the former : " Oh that thou 
woulclst hide me in the grave ! '" 

The opposite opinion is evidently adopt- 

F 



82 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



eel under a prejudice — namely, that the 
doctrine of the resurrection was not re- 
vealed so early as the age of Job. But 
this conception is, with equal evidence, 
erroneous. The man must have a narrow 
knowledge of theology who can doubt that 
Abraham fully held the doctrine of the 
resurrection, for, dying in faith, " he looked 
for a city which hath foundations, whose 
builder and maker is God." He looked 
for a return from the grave to the glori- 
fied Canaan; of course by the resurrection. 
" For now they desire a better country, 
that is an heavenly: wherefore God is 
not ashamed to be called their God ; 
for he hath prepared for them a city!' 
Our Lord, in arguing on the resurrec- 
tion, proves the doctrine to have been 
discoverable in the Pentateuch ; and 
though the Pentateuch was probably later 
than Job, Abraham was probably earlier. : 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



83 



This great doctrine seems to have been 
even habitual to Abraham, when he consoles 
his natural sorrow for the sacrifice of the 
heir of promise by believing that God 
would raise him from the dead — a concep- 
tion which, if not previously revealed, is 
the most inconsistent of all conceptions 
with the course of human thought or the 
process of nature ; for all around is decay, 
and irrecoverable decay. The strong pro- 
bability is, that the doctrine was revealed 
from the Fall, for sacrifice as an atonement 
for sin leads directly to a state of retribu- 
tion, and that state, from the very fabric 
of society, cannot be in this world. 

Ail heathenism possessed the doctrine of 
a life beyond the grave. How could this 
belief have been acquired except by the 
descent from the families of the Disper- 
sion \ All that man knows of man by 
nature terminates in the grave ; all be- 



84 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



yond must be revelation. The few ana- 
logies are trifling. The blossom and the 
butterfly furnish nothing on which to 
build the faith of man. Heathenism dis- 
figured the truth by its obscure percep- 
tions of the future ; but the truth, though 
clouded, was there. It is true that Christ 
alone brought "life and immortality to 
light." His words gave the clearest ex- 
pression of the doctrine, and His resur- 
rection the most perfect example of its 
reality. The dead had been raised be- 
fore, but they afterwards underwent the 
course of nature. Our Lord was the only 
being in the form of man who, after under- 
going death, rose and died no more. 

Job's application of the doctrine is 
exactly what it might be at this hour by 
any man conscious of innocence, yet hope- 
less of justice. He desires that the recol- 
lections of his wrongs shall be recorded 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



85 



for ever, in the conviction that his char- 
acter shall be cleared, and his injuries 
atoned, in the day when injustice shall be 
no more. The language of the text is 
exactly of the order which w 7 e would use 
at this day. " I know that my Eedeemer 
liveth, and that he shall stand at the 
latter day upon the earth : and though 
after my skiri worms destroy this body, 
yet in my flesh shall I see God : whom I 
shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall 
behold, and not another ; though my reins 
be consumed within me." 

Here it is observable that, if restoration 
had been the object of the language, the 
greater part would have been superfluous. 
It would have been enough to say, 66 In my 
flesh I shall see God." But we have the 
introduction of a Eedeemer, or Avenger, of 
whose operation nothing is told but that 
" he shall stand at the latter day upon the 



86 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



earth/' a matter which can have no con- 
nection with the recovery of Job in his 
lifetime : " Whom I shall see for myself, 
and mine eyes shall behold" — also a matter 
equally unnecessary to be told if Job was 
to be restored in his lifetime ; but both of 
the highest significance on the supposition 
that he was to die. Then the promised Re- 
deemer — he who is the Resurrection and 
the Life — the recovery of his senses, and 
the vision of the Almighty, essential to 
his confidence here, would be essential to 
his consolation hereafter. 

There are some differences in the trans- 
lation by the various authorities, but none 
of substantial value. Lee, an accurate 
Hebraist, thus gives it with the supple- 
mentary italics : — - 

" I know that my Redeemer liveth, and 
that he shall stand hereafter upon the 
earth ; and that after this my skin shall 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



87 



have been pierced through, still in my 
flesh shall I see God, that I shall see for 
myself, and mine eyes shall behold him, 
and not a stranger, when my reins shall 
have been consumed within me," 

The Vulgate thus gives its transla- 
tion : — 

" I know that my Redeemer liveth, and 
that in the last day I shall rise from the 
earth, and again I shall be enveloped with 
my skin, and in my flesh shall I see my 
God, whom I myself shall see, and my eyes 
shall behold, and not another. This my 
hope is laid up in my bosom." 

Mason Good thus translates it : — 

" I know that my Eedeemer liveth, 
And will ascend upon the earth ; 
And after the disease hath destroyed my skin, 
That in my flesh I shall see God, 
Whom I shall see for myself, 
And my eyes shall behold, and not another, 
Though my reins be consumed within me." 

The Syriac version is : — 



88 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



" I know that my Eecleemer liveth, and 
in the consummation he will be revealed 
upon the earth ; and after my skin, I shall 
bless myself in these things ; and after my 
flesh, if my eyes shall see God, I shall see 

light,- 

The Septuagint, which contains some 
evidently fictitious passages relative to Job, 
gives an evidently fictitious translation, 
which renders the text unintelligible. 

The general objections to the doctrine 
are trivial. It is thus said that, if Job 
believed in a resurrection, all his doubts of 
Providence would be referred to the future 
retribution. Yet how many a man, in the 
full belief of a future state, is perplexed 
with the ways of Providence here ! 

It is said that the language of Job ex- 
presses the perpetuity of death in such 
phrases as — "He that goeth down to the 
grave shall return no more/' But this is 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



89 



the common language of man deploring 
the loss of the dead to their living friends 
and occupations. They shall return to 
their circle no more ; their labours in life 
cannot be renewed. The prophets speak 
of the grave as the final resting-place. The 
Psalmist speaks of the tomb as the place 
of man's dissolution, even while he speaks 
of Him whose soul was not to rest in 
Hades, nor his body to " see corruption." 
If it is argued that God actually did ap- 
pear, did Job expect his appearance ? On 
the contrary, did he not believe that God 
was his persecutor? In fact, the whole 
question may be decided by common ex- 
perience. All Job's expectations are con- 
nected with a world beyond the grave. 
He expects the visible presence of the 
Almighty. What right had he, more than 
any other man, to expect that sight in this 
world, whether in the shape of his Ee- 



90 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



cleemer or his Avenger % In his despair of 
justice he desires to leave a record graven 
in the rock — an imperishable statement 
of his sufferings and wrong — in the confi- 
dence that, when his Eedeemer stands on 
the earth, shall come the day of vindica- 
tion, at which day he shall be present in 
his own person — in his own flesh, seeing 
God with his own eyes ! All these things 
are the true faith of the believer ; they 
would be the simple fantasies of the sick- 
bed, and the sure reliance of the believer in 
a resurrection be only the vapourish extra- 
vagance of the roan, who, however afflicted 
with disease, spoke in the conviction of 
recovery. 

It is also to be remembered, and the 
testimonial is of weight, that our Church 
has placed Job's declaration in the front of 
her Burial Service, as witnessing the doc- 
trine of the Resurrection. 



CHAPTER X. 



THE JEWS. 

The history of the Jews is a history of 
Divine Providence. For the first and the 
last time on the earth there was shown to 
mankind the visible government of God. 
While the Almighty ruled all other nations 
through minor energies and impulses, he 
ruled the Jews by his direct power. He 
was their known deliverer from bondage, 
their guide through the infancy of their 
state, their leader in conquest, their legis- 
lator in the settlement of their constitu- 
tion, and their declared King. The evi- 
dent purpose of this direct deviation from 



92 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



the general principle of Divine rule, was 
to prove the existence of the living God. 
The earth was heathen. Nations are to 
be taught only by example ; and there 
could be conceived no more pressing and 
powerful example than the sight of a cen- 
tral nation, shaped by the Divine hand, 
sustained by the Divine power, and in 
every part of its existence giving irresis- 
tible proof of a God. 

If a visible extension of this form of 
government would have been injurious to 
the general energy of the human race, the 
danger was guarded against bv the sinall- 
ness of the Jewish territory, by the peculiar 
observances which separated them from all 
other nations, and by the restriction of 
miracle to the Jewish kingdom. System 
was perpetual — all was regulated by 
supreme interposition. From the hour of 
the calling of Abraham to leavehis country, 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



93 



and seek a yet unknown country for a yet 
unborn nation, lie was under the declared 
direction of Jehovah. While yet without 
a foot of land on earth, he was promised, 
in his posterity, the possession of the land 
from the Euphrates to the Nile. Every 
movement of the patriarch, of his imme- 
diate descendant, and of his nation, was 
ordered by vision, by prophecy, or by the 
direct command of the Almighty. The 
promise of territory was at length per- 
formed in the kingdom of David, and of 
prosperity, power, and unrivalled splendour 
in the reign of his son. Solomon was the 
most magnificent monarch of his age — per- 
haps the most magnificent whom the world 
has ever seen. The builder of the Temple, 
the palaces, and public edifices — the lord 
of Asiatic commerce — the master of all the 
territory stretching between the Mediter- 
ranean and Mesopotamia, must have been 



94 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



the great king of the Asiatic world. The 
mere outline given in the books of the 
Kings and Chronicles, gives the conception 
of unparalleled wealth, and of the most 
regal expenditure. All was gold and cedar 
in the royal buildings ; the furnishing of 
those palaces was equally regal. 

"And all kino; Solomons drinking ves- 
sels were of gold, and all the vessels of the 
house of the forest of Lebanon were of 
pure gold ; none were of silver : it was 
nothing accounted of in the days of Solo- 
mon. So king Solomon exceeded all the 
kings of the earth for riches and for wis- 
dom" (1 Kings x. 21, 23). 

At this period the Babylonian empire 
was unborn, and the Jewish kingdom 
shone in solitary splendour. But it pos- 
sessed a characteristic which would have 
eclipsed the whole long range of imperial 
diadems — the supernatural intellect of its 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



95 



king. God had given the understanding 
of the master of the throne ; and even in 
the remoteness of tradition we have the 
proof of its supremacy in its practical in- 
fluence on its time. " And all the kings 
of the earth sought the presence of Solo- 
mon, to hear his wisdom, that God had 
put in his heart. And they brought every 
man his present, vessels of silver, and 
vessels of gold, and raiment, harness, and 
spices, horses, and mules, a rate year by 
year. And the king made silver in 
Jerusalem as stones, and cedar-trees made 
he as the sycamore-trees that are in the 
low plains in abundance 79 (2 Chronicles 
ix. 23 5 24, 27). 

The knowledge of God had probably 
survived in some worshippers, even in the 
lands of heathenism. To these the tidings 
of Judea must have come with powerful 
influence. There have been many minds 



96 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



studying that mixture of mystery and 
natural religion which forms to this day 
the philosophy of the East. Those must 
have looked to the living oracle of the 
Jewish kingdom with ardour and aston- 
ishment. In that age the distant East 
could have shown nothing but the rude 
habits of nomades, or the mutual ravage of 
barbarians. We can conceive the delight 
and surprise of the seekers of wisdom, on 
entering from those regions of violence and 

o o 

sterility into the Jewish kingdom : in see- 
ing the great opulence and sacred security 
of the people — the possession of hereditary 
property, which neither the throne nor the 
soldiery could seize — every man sitting 
under his own vine and his own fig-tree ; 
the luxuriance of a landscape cultivated to 
the hill-tops ; the loveliness of a climate 
tempered by the bounty of heaven, and 
producing three unfailing harvests in the 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



97 



year; those harvests great national fes- 
tivals, assembling the whole youth of Judea 
in national companionship in the great 
capital — that capital itself, by its strength 
and position, and still more by heroic and 
sacred remembrances, worthy to be the 
crowning city of the consecrated kingdom. 
Every step must have been a new wonder. 
With what natural homage must they have 
ascended the mountain of the Temple, and 
witnessed the stateliest worship of the 
earth within its walls ! And with what 
natural veneration must they have, last of 
all, stood in the presence of the Gocl-given 
mind, the mighty King of Israel ! It is 
scarcely possible to suppose that this scene, 
this accumulation of the noblest ideas, was 
altogether in vain — that those pilgrims and 
tributaries to wisdom returned to their 
remote hills and plains without deep im- 
pressions of Judea. Many an offering, in 

Gr 



98 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



after years, in the bordering shores and 
forests of the world, may have sent up the 
homage of hallowed hearts to the God of 
Abraham. 

The reign of Solomon continued forty 
years, all prosperous until nearly the close, 
when, in the decline of his life, probably of 
his understanding, he fell into idolatry. 
Polygamy, the cancer of Oriental life, was 
the crime which tempted this wondrous 
man to sin against the national allegiance 
to the Almighty. The sin was instantly 
punished by threats of war, symptoms of 
rebellion, and the still deeper threat of the 
divine dismemberment of the kingdom. 

Immediately on the death of Solomon 
the divine threat was performed. On the 
assemblage of the heads of the tribes in She- 
chem, the capital of the tribe of Ephraim, 
ten of the tribes abjured the sovereignty of 
the son of Solomon, to which they never 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



99 



returned ; adopted idolatry, from which 
they were never reclaimed : and after suffer- 
ing the punishment of their apostasy during 
254 years of domestic troubles and foreign 
war. with a throne continually assailed by 
conspiracy, the ten tribes were carried into 
captivity by an Assyrian invasion: from 
this captivity they never returned ; the 
kingdom of Israel was extinguished for 
ever. 

From the period of the revolt, the king- 
dom of David was reduced to the tribes of 
Judah and Benjamin, which, bordering on 
each other, continued in close connection 
until the Babylonian Captivity, always 
united in interest, and generally passing 
under one name. In the revolt, the priest- 
hood and Levites dwelling among the ten 
tribes chiefly joined Judah. The temple, 
though often stripped of its wealth by the 
successive invasions, still preserved its sane- 



100 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



tity in the national eyes, and exhibited 
the original worship. The kings fell into 
idolatry from reign to reign, but the people 
seem never to have wholly apostatised 
until the final years of the kingdom. At 
length the vengeance, often predicted and 
often checked, finally came. Jerusalem, 
after suffering the miseries of a protracted 
siege, was captured by the army of Nebu- 
chadnezzar ; its king, princes, and people 
were carried into captivity; the temple 
and the city burned, the walls razed. Je- 
rusalem, thus left a ruin in the midst of a 
land turned into a desert, seemed to have 
perished beyond the hope of restoration. 
This most awful example of divine judg- 
ment was given, for the wisdom and the 
warning of all nations, 588 years after the 
foundation of the kingdom of David; 388 
years after the revolt of the ten tribes ; 
134 years after the extinction of the king- 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



101 



dom of Israel; and 588 years before the 
era of Christianity. 

Still, by the most remarkable contrast 
in ancient history, there remained a dis- 
tinction in the punishments of the two 
kingdoms. Israel had perished ; its popu- 
lation had been absorbed in the Assyrian 
empire, and its land had been delivered to 
a population of strangers. Judah, though 
divested of throne, laws, worship, and coun- 
try, and thus stripped of all the elements 
of national existence, survived as a people. 
Nothing could be more perilous than their 
condition — conquered, captive, living in 
the midst of idolaters, and in an age when 
conquest w 7 as the chief occupation of the 
throne, tyranny the habitual law, and the 
sword the only instrument of power. Yet 
throughout the Captivity the Jew retained 
his religion, his rights, and his customs, 
apparently unmolested. Even the sacred 



102 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



vessels of the temple, the most natural 
objects of confiscation in those ages of ra- 
pacity, were preserved untouched until the 
last moment of the empire; and even then 
their sanctity was vindicated by a miracle 
of vengeance — the death of the desecrator, 
and the fall of his throne. The Book of 
Daniel, one of the most illustrious records 
of the providential government, details 
the series of those high prophetic and 
miraculous interpositions by which the 
paroxysms of imperial tyranny, and the 
caprices of imperial temper, were not 
merely thwarted, but were turned into 
proclamations of the universal supremacy 
of Jehovah. 

But the persevering care of Providence 
extended to the whole breadth of the Cap- 
tivity and the Exile. The nation had 
been separated into three portions : one 
in Babylon or its vicinity ; a second in 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



103 



the provinces on the Chebar, a conflu- 
ent of the Euphrates ; and the third, a 
body of fugitives in Egypt. To each of 
these divisions a great prophet was com- 
missioned, each apparently for a separate 
but essential purpose : Daniel in Babylon 
for protection, at the head of the govern- 
ment ; Ezekiel for the support of the 
national hope by prophecies, especially 
promising national restoration ; and Jere- 
miah for the remonstrance and reproof of 
a population exposed to the temptations 
of Egyptian idolatry. Too little is known 
of the actual feelings of the people for a 
description of their resistance to the com- 
bined pressure of idolatry and misfortune. 
But the stern warnings of Ezekiel against 
false prophets, and the still more distinct 
rebukes of the faithlessness, the murmur- 
ings, and even the false worship of the 
jews in Egypt, give a strong conception 



104 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



of the bitterness with which they felt the 
national calamity, and even of the indig- 
nation with which they exclaimed against 
the supposed injustice of the " God of 
their fathers." 

This is the answer of the exiles in Egypt 
to the exhortations of Jeremiah : " As for 
the word that thou hast spoken unto us in 
the name of the Lord, we will not hearken 
unto thee. But we will certainly do what- 
soever thing goeth forth out of our own 
mouth, to burn incense unto the queen 
of heaven, and to pour out drink-offerings 
unto her, as we have done, we, and our 
fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the 
cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jeru- 
salem: for then had we plenty of victuals, 
and were well, and saw no evil. But since 
we left off to burn incense to the queen of 
heaven, and to pour out drink-offerings un- 
to her, we have wanted all things, and have 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



105 



been consumed by the sword and by the 
famine/' 

The answer of Jeremiah is, that those 
very acts were the cause of the national 
ruin. " The incense that ye burned in the 
cities of Juclah and in the streets of Jeru- 
salem, ye, and your fathers, your kings, 
and your princes, and the people of the 
land, did not the Lord remember them, 
and came it not into his mind % So that 
the Lord could no longer bear, because of 
the evil of your doings, and because of the 
abominations which ye ha to committed. 
Therefore is your land a desolation, and 
an astonishment, and a curse, without an 
inhabitant, as at this day ;; (J eremiah 
xliv. 16, &c.) 

The whole nation had transgressed in 
the shape of the same offence, and when 
we recollect the haughty and intractable 
nature of the people, we can scarcely doubt 



106 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



that the arguments which were used by 
the Jew in Egypt were used by the Jew 
in Babylonia. But the smallness of the 
number who returned from the Captivity 
seems a sufficient evidence of the general 
alienation. Though prophecy, the sanc- 
tion of the Persian throne, the presence 
of their princes, and the exhortations 
of their priesthood, were all united in 
urging the nation to their return, the 
actual number amounted scarcely to fifty 
thousand. 

Still the Nation was restored ; the 
temple, the worship, the laws were ac- 
knowledged once more anions; men : and 
the loss of the national independence was 
more than compensated by promises of a 
mysterious grandeur surpassing all the 
imaginations of man. These promises 
have never yet been fulfilled. After a 
protected existence under the successive 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



107 



empires of the Persian, Macedonian, and 
Roman, the nation was suddenly extin- 
guished by the Roman sword, and has 
ever since remained in the most marked 
humiliation of any people of the world : 
an extinguished nation, yet a surviving 
people, for eighteen hundred years. 

For this most remarkable and unexam- 
pled prolongation of penalty there must 
be a reason. The idolatry of the Jews 
was the declared crime punished by the 
Captivity. Yet even that crime was atoned, 
the penalty being paid by the " seventy 
years 5 captivity" in Babylon. The Jew 
has never repeated that crime ; yet why 
has a still more prolonged, deeper, and 
apparently more hopeless suffering been 
inflicted % The Jew assigns no reason ; 
the Christian finds the sufficient reason in 
the rejection of the Messiah. 

Without entering into the detail of con- 



108 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



troversy, there are obvious considerations 
which might relieve the Jew from all per- 
plexity. The prophecy of Jacob on his 
deathbed distinctly states that the Shiloh 
of the nation shall come before the extinc- 
tion of the Jewish sceptre. " The sceptre 
shall not depart from Judah, nor a law- 
giver from between his feet, until Shiloh 
come ; and unto him shall the gathering 
of the people be" (Genesis xlix. 10). All 
the ancient versions of the Pentateuch 
agree in regarding the Shiloh (the Sent) 
as the Messiah. The modern Jews, since 
the controversy began, deny this applica- 
tion ; but the Targum of Onkelos (Chal- 
dean version), the most valued by the 
Jews, and the oldest of the eleven Targums 
(versions or interpretations, probably B.C. 
60), thus gives the prophecy : " One hav- 
ing the principality shall not be taken 
from the house of Judah, nor a scribe 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



109 



from his children's children, until the 
Messiah come whose the kingdom is." 

The memorable prophecy of the " Seventy 
weeks/' distinctly referring to the Messiah, 
also limits his coming to the period of the 
national existence : " Know therefore and 
understand, that from the going forth of 
the commandment to restore and to build 
Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince 
shall be seven weeks, and threescore and 
two weeks : the street shall be built 
again, and the wall, even in troublous 
times. And after threescore and two 
weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not 
for himself ; and the people of the prince 
that shall come shall destroy the city and 
the sanctuary ;; (Daniel ix. 25, 26). 

There have been difficulties concerning 
the exact dates of this great prophecy ; 
but there can be none concerning its 
limitation to the period preceding the ruin 



]10 THE BOOK OF JOB. 

of Jerusalem and the extinction of the 
Jews as a nation possessing Judea."* 

Another hitherto unobserved testimony 
is given in the earliest transaction of 
human society — the offerings of Cain and 
Abel. Cain, the elder brother and the 
natural heir, brings the work of his hands ; 
Abel brings the lamb, the offering of faith. 
The offering of Cain is rejected, and he 
loses the heirship, but is suffered by the 
Almighty to have a hope of reconciliation 
on repentance and adopting the offering 
of Abel. He refuses, and slays his brother. 
For this act he loses the inheritance for 
ever ; is banished from the place of his 
birth ; is sent forth into a world sterile to 
him by the divine sentence ; is condemned 

* Seventy weeks of years are 490 years. That the pro- 
phecy refers to years seems to be authenticated by the 
striking fact, probably not hitherto observed, that the 70 
years of the Captivity, whose termination produced Daniel's 
prayer, referred to 490 years, the duration covered by the 
70 Sabbatical years violated by the Jews. 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



Ill 



to perpetual "wandering ; yet is preserved 
in existence by some divine mark, which 
prohibits his extinction by the hand of 
man. 

The antitype is the Jewish people — the 
"firstborn/' the elder brother of Christianity, 
the original heir of the divine inheritance. 
When the appointed period of deciding the 
inheritance arrived, the Jew's offering by 
the u Law of Works " was rejected ; the 
Christian s offering by faith was accepted. 
Still there was a period when the Jew 
might have repaired his error. For seven 
years the apostles were forbidden to preach 
the Gospel but to the Jews. The nation 
still rejected the Gospel. At the end of 
those years the commission was extended 
to the Gentiles by a miracle, and St Peter 
was sent to the centurion Cornelius as the 
first-fruits of the harvest among the hea- 
thens. Then persecution began, and the 



112 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



Christian Church, existing in Judea was 
trampled. Then vengeance fell upon the 
nation, and, within a lifetime, the temple, 
the city, and the religion were overthrown, 
and the nation thenceforth was an exile 
through the world, yet still preserving its 
existence — still, by a condition contradic- 
tory to the course of human nature, and 
unexampled in the history of all other 
nations, existing without any one of the 
sustaining and substantial qualities of a 
nation — without king, or government, or 
country. 



As it is not the purpose of this volume 
to engage in controversy with the Jew, 
especially as all question of his belief seems 
to be held as an offence, no reference shall 
be made to the Jewish belief beyond the 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



113 



absolute necessity of elucidation. But it 
is the known characteristic of the Jew that 
he remains unable to assign any direct 
cause for the condition of his religion, 
country, and people. He cannot discover 
any ground for the universal humiliation 
of the sons of Abraham. In the services of 
the synagogue, and in all his other forms 
of worship, he fully acknowledges this 
humiliation. Thus, in the service for the 
day of Atonement he says — 

" We have no guide, as in the days of 
old ; no High-priest to offer an offering, 
nor any Altar on which to offer a whole 
burnt-offering. 

" AVe have no burnt-offering nor tres- 
pass-offering ; no sacrifice, nor sprinkling 
of blood ; no sin-offering, nor oblations, 
nor purification ; no Jerusalem, no forest 
of Lebanon ; no frankincense nor shew- 
breacl ; no veil nor mercy-seat ; no Zion. 

H 



114 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



" For because of our iniquities, and the 
iniquities of our fathers, have we wanted 
all these things." 

Still these declarations amount to no 
substantial confession, and the universal 
answer to the rejection of the Messiah is, 
that the crime has never been committed, 
and that the J ew still looks for the coming; 
of the true Messiah. The result is natu- 
rally seen in the conviction that there was 
no national ground for the fall of the 
people, and that it must be left among the 
unexplained acts of a Power too high to 
be questioned, and too mysterious to be 
understood. 

Christianity is only a divine expansion 
of Judaism. All its evidences are Jewish ; 
all its principles are expressions of the 
Law and the Prophets. The histories of 
the four Evangelists are the practical ful- 
filment of the emblems, types, and pro- 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 115 

raises of Judaism. The planting of Chris- 
tianity is a continued parallelism to the 
planting of Judaism. This similitude, 
carried on through ages, could never have 
been the work of man. Its purpose, form, 
and effect were declared from the begin- 
ning. 

" I will raise them up a Prophet from 
among their brethren like unto thee, and 
will put my words in his mouth ; and he 
shall speak unto them all that I shall com- 
mand him. And it shall come to pass, 
that whosoever will not hearken unto my 
words which he shall speak in my name, 
I wiU require it of him " (Deuteronomy 
xviii. 18, 19). Nothing can be more sig- 
nificant than this declaration. The voice 
of the Almighty, which had terrified the 
nation at Sinai, was to have a substi- 
tute, not in Moses, but, in a time subse- 
quent to his mission, in a J ew, who was to 



116 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



speak by the direct commands of God, 
and disobedience to whose words was to 
bring down divine vengeance on the 
offenders. The conclusion is irresistible. 
What could be the object of a new com- 
mission but to supersede the old % Pro- 
vidence never allows superfluities. AVhat 
could be the substance of a new commis- 
sion but some change, addition, or expan- j 
sion of the old \ "What the threat of a 
new national punishment but the warning 
against a new condition of a new national 
crime % Idolatry was the crime against 
which the wrath of the Mosaic code was 
levelled, and had been punished by the 
temporary fall and exile of the nation. 
After the return from the seventy years' 
captivity, the nation never committeclr 
idolatry again. Yet where are they now 1 
Still nationally extinguished, after a lapse 
of eighteen centuries. If J esus of Nazareth 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



117 



was the Messiah, his crucifixion Trill fully 
account for the calamity of the people ; 
for such a crime was measureless. If he 
was not the Messiah, no man has ever been 
able to assign any sufficient cause for its 
suffering ; and the Jew, however he may 
suppress the expression of his feeling, 
must conceive himself the victim (in all 
humility be it spoken) of divine injustice, 
and all men must regard the Jew as ex- 
posed to a severity unequalled in all the 
other acts of Providence, contrary to its 
declared principles, and inexplicable on 
any motives ever addressed to the under- 
standing of man. 



\ 



CHAPTER XL 

TYPE AND ANTITYPE. 

Of the three great proofs of revelation, 
prophecy, miracle, and type, the last is 
entitled to the highest rank as evidence. 

Prophecy and miracle are both capable 
of imitation by human fraud, as there 
have been fictitious prophecies and ficti- 
tious miracles ; but the relation of type 
and antitype, being wholly founded on 
facts beyond the power of man, is obvi- 
ously beyond his imitation. 

All are divine, suitable to their different 
purposes — prophecy developing the future, 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



119 



miracle giving its proof to the present, 
type and antitype developing the past. 

Both prophecy and miracle may find 
some resemblance in man's operation — 
the former in human sagacity and conjec- 
ture, the latter in the dexterity of art and 
the discoveries of science. But the con- 
nection of type with antitype — namely, of 
memorable characters or events in one 
period with characters or events of the 
same at intervals of hundreds or thou- 
sands of years — is wholly unlike, and 
wholly above, any faculty of man. 

Both prophecy and miracle are ad- 
dressed to the understanding at the time. 
Type is unintelligible at the time; is there- 
fore not addressed to the understanding 
of the time, and until the coming of 
the antitype remains a secret of Provi- 
dence. 

An invariable rule of type is its in- 



120 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



feriority in interest and magnitude to 
antitype. Chrysostom asserts the con- 
trary, but that showy orator is always a 
feeble theologian; all the chief types of 
the Old Testament finding their antitype 
in Christ. 

The subject, of course, is too large for 
these pages ; it requires a volume. And 
though it has been humbled by feeble 
and fantastic interpretations, it will, when 
treated on an adequate scale, probably 
exhibit some of the most striking instances 
of providential foresight, as it unquestion- 
ably forms a leading principle in the pro- 
vidential government of the world. 

The history of Job is a type, of wdiich 
the antitype is the history of the Jews 
from the kingdom of David and Solomon 
to the end of the world. In all instances 
of this order it is necessary only to show 
general resemblance in the facts, and in 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



121 



their succession ; exact similitude would 
be mere repetition ; as Cyril of Alexandria 
observes, e O tvttos ovk aKrq6eia ) fJLopcfxocnv, 
Se [ia\\ov 9 T779 aXrjOeias elcr^epet — "Type 
is not the actual truth, but carries the 
form of the actual truth" — the proof of 
its divine origin consisting; in the dissi- 
militude of the circumstances under which 
this general similitude of facts and their 
succession is invariably retained. 



CHAPTER XII. 

APPLICATION OF TYPE AND ANTITYPE TO 
THE HISTORY OF JOB AND 
OF THE JEWS. 

By placing the leading facts of both 
series in juxtaposition, the fairest judg- 
ment is to be formed of their connec- 
tion. 

Job was a man distinguished for piety, 
wealth, and wisdom — " so that this man 
was the greatest of all the men of the 
East/' He had a wife and ten children. 
Those children were grown to maturity, 
and had separate properties, but retained 
their connection with each other and with 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



123 



Job, feasted in each other's houses, and 
after those feasts Job sent for them, and 
sacrificed, " offering burnt-offerings accord- 
ing to the number of'them all." 

It is remarkable that no mention is 
made of the genealogy of Job, or of the 
original inheritance of his wealth, nor any 
explanation of the unusual circumstance 
that all his children possessed wealth and 
houses of their own. 

The kingdom of David, and of his suc- 
cessor Solomon, constituted the richest, 
the most religious, and the most splendid 
sovereignty of its time. Judah was the 
royal tribe by prophecy, by military 
strength, and by the possession of the 
capital of Judea and the temple. The 
tribe of Benjamin was combined with it 
in the closest connection of policy and 
territory, Jerusalem itself being in a dis- 
trict of Benjamin, and the name of the 



124 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



tribe being often merged in that of Judah, 
so as virtually to form bat one. The 
other tribes had separate provinces, but 
all united by the common bond of patri- 
archal descent. The whole kingdom was 
underived from human inheritance ; it was 
a divine gift ; and the possessions of the 
tribes were fixed at the same time and 
by the same authority. The solemnisa- 
tion of the national worship was appointed 
to Jerusalem alone, the temple being the 
only place of sacrifice according to the 
law, and the tribes being commanded to 
offer worship there three times in the 
year, all holding the great festivals of the 
Passover, the Pentecost, and the Feast of 
Tabernacles. 

Job in one day lost all his wealth and 
all his children. His flocks and herds 
were carried away by desert robbers, and 
his children, assembled to feast in the 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



125 



house of their elder brother, were killed 
in its fall by a storm. But he bore 
this double calamity with fortitude ; he 
made no complaint, but rent his mantle, 
"fell down upon the ground and wor- 
shipped/' his wife alone remaining of his 
family. 

On the death of Solomon, his son Ee- 
hoboam went to Shechem, the city of the 
tribe of Ephraim, the chief of the ten, 
"for all Israel were come to Shechem to 
make him king." There he quarrelled 
with their leaders. The tribes suddenly 
revolted, and abjured all connection with 
the kingdom of David, "saying, What 
portion have we in David \ neither have 
we inheritance in the son of Jesse. To 
your tents, 0 Israel !" The revolt was by 
the divine will, having been prophesied ; 
it was final. The ten tribes soon fell into 
idolatry, and were wholly lost in the As- 



126 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



Syrian captivity. The kingdom, thus re- 
duced to the two tribes of Judah and 
Benjamin, was invaded within three years 
by the army of Shishak, the king of 
Egypt. Jerusalem was captured, and all 
the wealth of the city, and the golden 
ornaments of the temple, were carried 
away. Still, under all its privations, 
Judah retained the independence of a 
kingdom. The priests and Levites, dwell- 
ing among the ten tribes, had left them 
after the revolt, and taken refuge with 
Judah. The temple still retained its 
honour ; and the worship, though often 
impeded by the idolatry of the kings, and 
despoiled by invasion, always resumed its 
popular rank. The succession never failed 
in the line of David until the Captivity. 
It is observable that the chief sufferings 
of the kingdom were by temporary inva- 
sion for plunder, no conqueror holding 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



127 



possession of the land ; while the soil of 
Israel was not only swept of its popula- 
tion, but colonised from Assyria. In all 
these vicissitudes the tribe of Benjamin 
adhered to the tribe of Judah. 

The calamity of Job had hitherto been 
external ; it was now to be personal. He 
was stricken with an agonising disease. 
He was to be without help or home, 
"and he took a potsherd to scrape him- 
self withal, and he sat down among the 
ashes." His wife, using the language 
of despair and indignation, bids him 
" curse God and die." Job repels her 
language as foolishness, and retains his 
fortitude. 

The fall of the kingdom was gradual. 
In the reign of Jehoiakim (b.c. 606), Ne- 
buchadnezzer invaded Judah, captured the 
king, and carried some children of the 
nobles, among whom was Daniel, to Baby- 



128 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



Ion, leaving Jehoiakim as his vassal. From 
this date is reckoned the seventy years' cap- 
tivity. In six years after, Judah was again 
invaded by the army of Babylon, and the 
king put to death. In the next year the 
army of Babylon again entered Jerusa- 
lem, seized the treasures of the temple, 
and carried the king, Jehoiachin, and his 
princes, with a portion of the people, to 
Babylon, Ezekiel being among the cap- 
tives. Zedekiah, placed on the throne, re- 
belled after a reign of eleven years, and 
was carried in chains to Babylon. Thus, 
during eighteen years from the beginning 
of the Captivity, Judah retained its throne, 
its temple, and the forms of its govern- 
ment, though in vassalage to Babylon. 
But immediately after the dethronement 
of the last king, Jerusalem was burned to 
the ground (b.c. 588). 

The three friends of Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



129 



and Zophar. come by appointment to com- 
fort him ; they mourn over his condition. 
But Job suddenly bursts into wild exclama- 
tions of pain and rage, and charges of in- 
justice against the Almighty. His friends 
advise submission to the divine will, sug- 
gest the repentance of his secret offences, 
offer him the hope of divine reconciliation, 
and vindicate the justice of God. Job is 
still unconvinced, still exclaims against his 
wrongs, recapitulates his good deeds, and 
declares his utter inability to find any 
reason for his exclusive sufferings ; the 
long argument leaving both sides equally 
decided, his friends being silenced by Job's 
stubborn conviction of his own virtues. 
" So those three men ceased to answer 
Job, because he was righteous in his 
own eyes. 7 ' 

The kingdom of Judah, from the com- 
mencement of its vassalage to Babylon, 

i 



ISO 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



was evidently a scene of divided opinions 
and general distraction of council. But 
as this period has been already referred to, 
its mention here must be brief. It can be 
easily conceived that in such a time the 
suggestion to abandon Jehovah and adopt 
other gods at all risks, " Curse God and 
die," may have been common, since we see 
that this declaration was actually made by 
the fugitives in Egypt. It is observable, 
that while no prophet appeared among the 
captives of the kingdom of Israel, three of 
the most eminent were sent to the captives 
of Judah, one to each of their three por- 
tions ; Daniel to Babylon, Ezekiel to the 
province of Chebar, and Jeremiah to those 
in Egypt. The prophetic exclamations of 
Jeremiah are often almost literally in the 
bitter impetuosity of Job : — 

" 0 Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I 
was deceived. Thou art stronger than I, 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



131 



and hast prevailed. I am in derision 
daily ; every one mocketh me. For since 
I spoke, I cried violence and spoil, because 
the word of the Lord was made a reproach 
unto me, and a derision daily. Then I said, 
I will not make mention of him, nor speak 
any more in his nanie." The resemblance 
is sometimes almost identity. " Cursed be 
the day wherein I was born. Let not the 
day wherein my mother bare me be blessed. 
Cursed be the man who brought tidings to 
my father, saying, A man-child is born 
unto thee. ;; There must have been great 
repining and frequent doubtings of the 
justice of the God of Abraham among a 
passionate and half-idolatrous people, strip- 
ped of their country, and suffering the 
pangs of a heathen exile in the land of 
their conquerors. When we know how 
readily man in misfortune makes excuses 
for himself, we can well conceive the voice 



132 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



of a bruised nation crying out, What have 
we done 1 

The kingdom of David terminated in 
the Captivity. It never knew independ- 
ence again ; the people returned, but in 
vassalage to the successive empires. Even 
when the family of Herod ascended the 
throne, it was the throne of an Idumean 
dynasty, and in vassalage to Eome ; with 
the Captivity the first portion of the par- 
allelism closed. 

After an interval of silence between Job 
and his friends, Elihu * comes forward, hav- 
ing taken no share in the argument, not 
connected with any of the speakers, and 
suggesting no motive of friendship or sym- 
pathy for his coming. He comes only to 

* It is observable that Elihu and Elijah are the same 
name, "God Jehovah" differing in the Septuagint only 
by a single letter, EXiovs and EAtou, and in the Hebrew 
KlJV^n^ an( ^ f"P^N» — a coincidence which could not have 
been accidental, for we find among the people no repetition 
of the names. 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



133 



rectify the error of all, to explain the true 
purposes of Providence, and to vindicate 
the justice of God. He speaks by impulse, 
" like one in authority/' He rebukes the 
whole argument, declares his own view, 
and is supported by the audible voice of the 
Almighty. Job, thus rebuked, abandons 
his self-righteousness and his ignorance, is 
divested of his spiritual pride, and is for- 
given. He sacrifices for his three friends, 
Elihu requiring no sacrifice, and is com- 
pensated for his suffering by the double 
of his former wealth, by restoration to 
his rank, and by a new household of ten 
children, the three daughters being of 
especial beauty. 

As the transactions in the antitype are 
here wholly future, no parallelism can be 
offered from the Jewish history. But pro- 
phecy declares that, at an appointed time, 
a change shall be wrought on some portion 



134 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



of the Jewish people; that the veil which 
covers the Scriptures to their spiritual 
understanding shall be taken away; that 
they shall acknowledge their long error, 
and in the hour of their illumination con- 
fess, " I have heard of thee with the hear- 
ing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth 
thee." Then those who have been thus 
converted shall be led into the u glorified 
Canaan," and, with Abraham at their head, 
shall see the splendid fulfilment of the 
promises of the God of Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob, for ever. It is observable that, 
though the wealth of Job w^as doubled, the 
number of his children remained the same. 
But this number is strikingly consistent 
with the interpretation. There is no du- 
plication of the tribes in the splendid 
superabundance of the national prosperity. 
The family of Job, on his restoration, 
amounted but to twelve, including himself 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



135 



and his wife. We know, from the promise 
of our Lord to the apostles, that in the 
glorified Canaan the restored tribes shall 
be twelve, and no more : — 

" Verily I say unto you, that ye who 
have followed me, in the Eegeneration, 
when the Son of Man shall sit on the 
throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon 
twelve thrones, judging [governing] the 
Twelve Tribes of Israel." 

The singular beauty and especial names 
of Job's three daughters, doubtless, have a 
purpose still entirely beyond explanation, 
but awaiting that full performance of the 
divine promises which shall be given in 
the miraculous restoration of the sons of 
Abraham. 

How far the features of the type may 
be realised by the antitype is beyond con- 
jecture. But prophecy pronounces that the 
ten tribes, however scattered, shall be re- 



136 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



united to Judah and Benjamin, and that 
their territory shall be Canaan. Thus 
neither the number of the tribes nor the 
extent of the territory shall be enlarged. 

But the beauty, the opulence, and the 
grandeur of the kingdom shall be bound- 
less, double that of the kingdom of Solo- 
mon, once the most superb in the world. 

All the splendours of prophecy are con- 
densed upon the description of the future 
days of this wonder of the earth. " Be- 
hold, the Lord hath proclaimed unto the 
end of the world, Say ye to the daughter 
of Zion, Behold, thy salvation cometh ; 
behold, his reward is with him, and his 
work before him ; and they shall call thee 
The holy people, the redeemed of the Lord. 
For, behold, I create new heavens and a 
new earth. But be ye glad and rejoice 
for ever in that which I create ; for, behold, 
I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



137 



people a joy. The wolf and the lamb shall 
feed together, and the lion shall eat straw 
like the bullock and dust shall be the 
serpent s meat. They shall not hurt nor 
destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the 
Lord. And it shall come to pass, that 
from one new moon to another, and from 
one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come 
to worship before me, saith the Lord/' 

" The wilderness and the solitary place 
shall be glad for them, and the desert shall 
blossom as the rose. It shall blossom 
abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and 
singing ; the glory of Lebanon shall be 
given to it, the excellency of Carmel and 
Sharon ; they shall see the glory of the 
Lord, and the excellency of our God/' 

AVhile Isaiah thus pours out his exulta- 
tion over the sudden loveliness of nature 
in the land of Redemption, Jeremiah gives 
a transcendent view of its holiness : — " Be- 



138 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



hold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I 
will raise unto David a righteous Branch, 
and a King shall reign and prosper, and 
shall execute judgment and justice in the 
earth. In his days Judah shall be saved, 
and Israel shall dwell safely; and this is 
his name whereby he shall be called, The 
Lord our Eighteousness " (xxiii. 5, 6). 

But there is an additional and most im- 
portant characteristic in the future con- 
dition of the Jewish people ; they will be 
placed under a new covenant. At present 
they live under no covenant whatever, the 
old covenant of works being dissolved. 
The covenant of the Eestoration will be 
" written in the heart/' as was declared by 
Moses : — 

" For this commandment which I com- 
mand thee this day, it is not hidden from 
thee, neither is it far off. But the word 
is very nigh unto thee, in thy month, and 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



139 



in thy heart, that thou mayest do it" 
(Deuteronomy xxx. 11, 14). 

The declaration is repeated and enlarged 
by J eremiah : " Behold, the clays come, 
saith the Lord, that I will make a new 
covenant with the house of Israel, and 
with the house of Judah : not according 
to the covenant that I made with their 
fathers in the day that I took them by the 
hand to bring them out of the land of 
Egypt ; which my covenant they brake, 
although I was an husband unto them, saith 
the Lord : 

" But this shall be the covenant that I 
will make with the house of Israel ; After 
those days, saith the Lord, I will put my 
law in their inward parts, and write it 
in their hearts ; and will be their God, 
and they shall be my people. And they 
shall teach no more every man his neigh- 
bour, and every man his brother, saying, 



140 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



Know the Lord : for they shall all know 
me. from the least of them unto the greatest 

J o 

of them, saith the Lord ; for I will forgive 
their iniquity, and I will remember their 
sin no more/' 

The appeal to the powers of nature in 
confirmation of those promises strongly re- 
sembles the appeals in the Book of Job : 
" Thus saith the Lord, which giveth the 
sun for a light by day, and the ordinances 
of the moon and of the stars for a light 
by night, which divideth the sea when 
the waves thereof roar ; The Lord of hosts 
is his name " (Jeremiah xxxi. 35). 

The actual rei°;n of Christ on earth has 
been an old subject of that scepticism 
which, disregarding the language of Scrip- 
ture, rejects everything that belongs to 
Faith. The declarations of Scripture are 
distinct and frequent that Christ shall 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



141 



come, and shall rule over the earth. The 
angels, at the ascension, declared that as 
the apostles saw him taken up into 
heaven, "in like manner" he should come. 
It is declared that he shall sit at table 
with the apostles, that he shall drink wine 
with them as he did before, and that the 
faithful shall meet him in the clouds in 
his descent, and thus "shall be for ever 
with the Lord." 

The Christian Scriptures supply some 
additional features of this great consum- 
mation. The twelve tribes are to be judged, 
or governed, by the twelve apostles ; Satan 
is to be bound, or deprived of the power 
of tempting the world, for a thousand 
years ; the martyrs and other faithful in 
Christ are to be raised in the first resur- 
rection, and to be with Christ in his king- 
dom ; at the end of his reign Satan shall 



142 



THE BOOK OF JOB. 



be let loose again, shall disturb the world, 
and after a brief conflict he and his angels 
shall be flung into final ruin ; then the 
Universe shall be consumed in fire, and 
" there shall be a new Heaven and a new 
Earth, in which dwelleth righteousness." 



THE END. 



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